The Race to Communicate – Was Malaysia Airlines Right to Text The Lost Plane?

The Race to Communicate – Was Malaysia Airlines Right to Text The Lost Plane?

5:00pm, September 20, 2009 was when I got the call.

Someone’s telling me to call the Wisconsin Highway Patrol, my oldest son was in a terrible accident.  Then I call the police, who tell me my son has been airlifted to a hospital.  I’m in the car, madly driving 500 miles toward the hospital, talking to the doctor – hearing my son is in bad shape. It looks terminal.  Continuing the drive, deep into the blackest night, in the pouring rain.

Then the call from the hospital.  My son was dead.

I kept up the drive, made it to the hospital at daybreak.  Yes, that is my son.  Yes, he is dead.

I guess I had to see it to believe it.

Suddenly a new realization hit me.  My son has two brothers.  Both in college.  Both 500 miles away.  They had no idea what my last 14 hours were like.  They knew nothing about their brother.  How would they learn about this horrific news?

This accident was not a secret.  It was newsworthy, even if far from a major city.  My dead son had dozens of friends.  And they all use Facebook.  While as young men my sons don’t pay much attention to news radio or TV, they do pay attention to Facebook.  And texting.  How long would it take before someone went on-line and started telling the world that their brother was dead?

Do you call your sons on the phone and tell them their brother died?

Not wasting any time, I jumped in the car and started straight for my middle son’s college.  He was the closest with his brother.  They exchanged texts every day.  He would be checking his phone and his Facebook account.  I made the decision that this – this one thing – this had to be done in person.  I would not call, I would not text, I was going to tell him in person.

But could I beat Facebook and texting?

I loaded up with coffee and went back onto the highway.  And started another 10 hour drive.  I just kept wondering “how long do I have?  How long before these boys find the out – the hard way?”

I called my neighbor and told her the news.  I gave her my Facebook access and told her to monitor my account, and to pay attention to any traffic from people in my son’s network.  Look for anything that even hinted of bad news.  I had to focus on driving and couldn’t distract myself with mobile.

Eight hours later I drove into Chicago.  I was between 30 and 90 minutes to my son.  Depending on Chicago traffic!  But things seemed light; lighter than normal.  Maybe, just maybe, I had time.

As I pulled across town I knew I was only 20 minutes from my middle son.  Then my phone rang.  It was my neighbor. “It’s there Adam.  It’s there on Facebook.  Somebody found out, and the kids are starting to spread the news.  You better hurry.”

As safely, yet quickly, as possible I navigated in front of his 3 flat apartment on the south side.  Luckily, a parking spot on the street.  I pulled in, jumped out of the car and saw a window open in his apartment.  I started calling up “hey, you up there?  I need you to come unlock the door.  Hey, come to the door.”

Laconically my son came to the door.  I could tell by his eyes he didn’t know anything, and was curious why I was there.  I went inside, put my arms around him, and told him his brother was dead.

He accused me of a bad joke.  I quickly told him an accident happened, where, and that his brother didn’t make it.

Of course, he did not believe me.  So he picked up his phone.  He started looking for texts.  He saw there were none from his brother.  Then he jumped to his PC.  He pulled up Facebook.  He looked for his brother’s page – and then he started seeing the messages.  Messages of disbelief, grief, anger and fear as expressed by so many people who are 21 or 22 and suddenly come face to face with mortality.

My son was in shock, as could be expected.  But he was with me.  Then it hit him “have you told my little brother?”  I told him no.  “We have to go tell him.  Now.  Before he finds out some other way.”

We then jumped back in the car and beat it to his younger brother’s college.  My youngest son was far less of a social media fan.  Also, college soccer kept him very busy.  We knew he had been in class and soccer practice most of the day and evening, and he would not check anything until late at night.  We had a very good chance that he had not heard anything.

Luckily, when we arrived at his college and found him, he confirmed he had not seen his phone or PC for several hours while at class, practice, eating and finishing homework.  We told him the very, very bad news.

I’m glad my sons did not hear of their brother’s death via a text.  Or via Facebook.  It was a very, very, very difficult day for us.  And the next several.  Every minute etched forever in our memories.

As the next few days passed we all gained huge comfort from those who reached out to us via text, Facebook and Tweets.  Hundreds of messages and postings came in.  Social media was a tremendous way for all of us to connect and share stories about my now lost son.  Young people told me things I would never have known had they been limited to telling me face-to-face, but which they were willing to share via Facebook.  It was incredibly helpful.

We live in a very, very connected world.

Information, even things which may seem obscure in this large global environment, find their way to light quickly.  We all want information now – not later.  We want to know what, where and when – and we want to know it now.  We sign up for email newsletters, Facebook pages, linked-in networks and listen to our colleagues on Twitter so we know things as soon as possible.

This is tough for those who have to communicate bad news.  What’s the trade-off?  Do you wait and do it personally?  Or do you opt for moving quickly?  Is it better someone know the information now – even if it is painful – or do you seek to inform them in a personal way to address their needs, emotions and questions?  Do you broadcast the news, or keep it small?  Do you send it impersonally, or personally?  What is important?

Every organization is, to some extent, in the trust business

When you have to deliver bad news, how will you do it?  Whether you have to announce a layoff, plant closing, industrial accident, data breach, product recall, product failure, program failure – or even a fatality – you are communicating information that is personal, and emotional. It is information that requires a sense of the person, not just the news.  How will the information be received – and what does that mean for how it should be communicated?

It takes continuous effort to build trust, but it can be lost in a single, poorly constructed communication.

Malaysia Airlines had years to plan its communications for a downed plane.  How would it tell the world such news?  What tools would it use?  A preparedness plan should contain not only the action plan, but the communications plan as well.  And not only the message, but how it will be delivered. And how all touch points between the organization and the audience will be addressed.

Once flight 370 went missing Malaysia Airlines had days to plan its communications with families.  There were several possible scenarios, yet all had a common theme of communicating passenger status.  Passengers that are family members.  The airline had significant time to plan what it would say, and how.  To settle on texting families that their loved ones were forever gone was either incredibly bad planning, or indicates a significant lack of planning communications altogether.

When it was time for my sons to learn their brother was dead someone needed to be there to support them.  Someone who cared.  It was not news to be internalized without more discussion about what, how and why.  All bad news shares this requirement, to address the human need to ask questions.  Relying on email, texting, social media, newsletters or broadcast to share bad news ignores the very personal impact bad news has on the recipients.

Nobody wants to deliver bad news, but sometimes it is unavoidable.  Being prepared is incredibly important if you want to maintain trust.  Otherwise you can look as heartless, and untrustworthy, as Malaysia Airlines.

Connect with me on LinkedInFacebook  and Twitter.

Be Really Glad Bezos Bought The Washington Post

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon worth $25.2B just paid $250 million to become sole owner of The Washington Post

Some think the recent rash of of billionaires buying newspapers is simply rich folks buying themselves trophies.  Probably true in some instances – and that benefits no one.  Just look at how Sam Zell ruined The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.  Or Rupert Murdoch's less than stellar performance owning The Wall Street Journal.  It's hard to be excited about a financially astute commodities manager, like John Henry, buying The Boston Globe – as it has all the earmarks of someone simply jumping in where angels fear to tread.

These companies lost their way long ago.  For decades they defined themselves as newspaper companies.  They linked everything about what they did to printing a daily paper.  The service they provided, which was a mix of hard news and entertainment reporting, was lost in the productization of that service into a print deliverable. 

So when people started to look for news and entertainment on-line, these companies chose to ignore the trend.  They continued to believe that readers would always want the product – the paper – rather than the service. And they allowed themselves to remain fixated on old processes and outdated business models long after the market shifted.

The leaders ignored the fact that advertisers could obtain much more directed placement at targets, at far lower cost, on-line than through the broad-based, general ads placed in newspapers.  And that consumers could get a much faster, and cheaper, sale via eBay, CraigsList or Vehix.com than via overpriced classified ads. 

Newspaper leadership kept trying to defend their "core" business of collecting news for daily publication in a paper format.  They kept trying to defend their local advertising base.  Even though every month more people abandoned them for an on-line format.  Not one major newspaper headmast made a strong commitment to go on-line.  None tried to be #1 in news dissemination via the web, or take a leadership role in associating ad placement with news and entertainment. 

They could have addressed the market shift, and changed their approach and delivery.  But they did not.

Money manager Mr. Henry has done a good job of turning the Boston Red Sox into a profitable institution.  But there is nothing in common between the Red Sox, for which you can grow the fan base, bring people to the ballpark and sell viewing rights, and The Boston Globe.  The former is unique.  The latter is obsolete.  Yes, the New York Times company paid $1.1B for the Globe in 1993, but that doesn't mean it's worth $70M today.  Given its revenue and cost structure, as a newspaper it is probably worth nothing.

But, we all still want news.  Nobody wants the information infrastructure collecting what we need to know to crumble.  Nobody wants journalism to die.  But it is unreasonable to expect business people to keep investing in newspapers just to fulfill a public good.  Even Mr. Zell abandoned that idea. 

Thus, we need the news, as a service, to be transformed into a new, profitable enterprise.  Somehow these organizations have to abandon the old ways of doing things, including print and paper distribution, and transform to meet modern needs.  The 6 year revenue slide at Washington Post has to stop, and instead of thinking about survival company leadership needs to focus on how to thrive with a new, profitable business model.

And that's why we all should be glad Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post.  As head of Amazon.com  The Harvard Business Review ranked him the second best performing CEO of the last decadeCNNMoney.com named him Business Person of the Year 2012, and called him "the ultimate disruptor."

By not doing what everyone else did, breaking all the rules of traditional retail, Mr. Bezos built Amazon.com into a $61B general merchandise retailer in 20 years.  When publishers refused to create electronic books he led Amazon into competing with its suppliers by becoming a publisher.  When Microsoft wouldn't produce an e-reader, retailer and publisher Amazon.com jumped into the intensely competitive world of personal electroncs creating and launching Kindle.  And then upped the stakes against competitors by enhancing that into Kindle Fire.  And when traditional IT suppliers like HP and Dell were slow to help small (or any) business move toward cloud computing Amazon launched its own network services to help the market shift.

Mr. Bezos' language regarding his intentions post acquisition are quite telling, "change… is essential… with or without new ownership….need to invent…need to experiment." 

And that is exactly what the news industry needs today.  Today's leaders are HuffingtonPost.com, Marketwatch.com and other web sites with wildly different business models than traditional paper media.  WaPo success will require transforming a dying company, tied to an old success formula, into a trend-aligned organization that give people what they want, when they want it, at a profit.

And it's hard to think of someone better experienced, or skilled, than Jeff Bezos to provide that kind of leadership.  With just a little imagination we can imagine some rapid moves:

  • distribution of all content via Kindle style eReaders, rather than print.  Along with dramatically increasing the cost of paper subscriptions and daily paper delivery
  • Instead of a "one size fits all" general purpose daily paper, packaging news into more fitting targeted products.  Sports stories on sports sites.  Business stories on business sites.  Deeper, longer stories into ebooks available for $.99 purchase.  And repackaging of stories that cover longer time spans into electronic short-books for purchase.
  • Packaging content into Facebook locations for targeted readers.  Tying ads into these social media sites, and promoting ad sales for small, local businesses to the Facebook sites.
  • Or creating an ala carte approach to buying various news and entertainment in an iTunes or Netflix style environment (or on those sites)
  • Robustly attracting readers via connecting content with social media, including Twitter, to meet modern needs for immediacy, headline knowledge and links to deeper stories — with sales of ads onto social media
  • Tying electronic coupons, and buy-it-now capabilities to ads linked to appropriate content
  • Retargeting advertising sales from general purpose to targeted delivery at specific readers, with robust packages of on-line coupons, links to specials and fast, impulse purchase capability
  • Increased use of bloggers and ad hoc writers to supplement staff in order to offer opinions and insights quickly, but at lower cost.
  • Changes in compensation linked to page views and readership, just as revenue is linked to same.

We've watched a raft of newspapers and magazines disappear. This has not been a failure of journalism, but rather a failure of business leaders to address shifting markets and transform old organizations to meet modern needs.  It's not a quality problem, but rather a failure of strategy to adapt to shifting markets.  And that's a lesson every business leaders needs to note, because today, as I wrote in April, 2012, every company has to behave like a tech company!

Doing more of the same, cutting costs and rich egos won't fix a newspaper.  Only the willingness to experiment and find new solutions which transform these organizations into something very different, well beyond print, will work.  Let's hope Mr. Bezos brings the same zest for addressing these challenges and aligning with market needs he brought to Amazon.  To a large extent, the future of news and "freedom of the press" may well depend upon it.

 

Some Leaders Never Learn – Tribune’s Big, Dumb Bet

Tribune Corporation finally emerged from a 4 year bankruptcy on the last day of 2012.  Before the ink hardly dried on the documents, leadership has decided to triple company debt to double up the number of TV stations.  Oh my, some people just never learn.

The media industry is now over a decade into a significant shift.  Since the 1990s internet access has changed expectations for how fast, easily and flexibly we acquire entertainment and news.  The result has been a dramatic decline in printed magazine and newspaper reading, while on-line reading has skyrocketed.  Simultaneously, we're now seeing that on-line streaming is making a change in how people acquire what they listen to (formerly radio based) and watch (formerly television-based.)

Unfortunately, Tribune – like most media industry companies – consistently missed these shifts and underestimated both the speed of the shift and its impact.  And leadership still seems unable to understand future scenarios that will be far different from today.

In 2000 newspaper people thought they had "moats" around their markets. The big newspaper in most towns controlled the market for classified ads for things like job postings and used car sales.  Classified ads represented about a third of newspaper revenues, and 40% of profits.  Simultaneously display advertising for newspapers was considered a cash cow.  Every theatre would advertise their movies, every car dealer their cars and every realtor their home listings.  Tribune leadership felt like this was "untouchable" profitability for the LA Times and Chicago Tribune that had no competition and unending revenue growth.

So in 2000 Tribune spent $8B to buy Times-Mirror, owner of the Los
Angeles Times.  Unfortunately, this huge investment (75% over market
price at the time, by the way) was made just as people were preparing to
shift away from newspapers.  Craigslist, eBay and other user sites killed the market for classified ads.  Simultaneously movie companies, auto companies and realtors all realized they could reach more people, with more information, cheaper on-line than by paying for newspaper ads. 

These web sites all existed before the acquisition, but Tribune leadership ignored the trend.  As one company executive said to me "CraigsList!! You think that's competition for a newspaper?  Craigslist is for hookers!  Nobody would ever put a job listing on Craigslist."  Like his compadres running newspapers nationwide, the new competitors and trends toward on-line were dismissed with simplistic statements and broad generalizations that things would never change.

The floor fell out from under advertising revenues in newspapers in the 2000s. There was no way Times-Mirror would ever be worth a fraction of what Tribune paid.  Debt used to help pay for the acquisition limited the options for Tribune as cost cutting gutted the organization.

Then, in 2007 Sam Zell bailed out management by putting together a leveraged buyout to acquire Tribune company.  Saying that he read 3 newspapers every day, he believed people would never stop reading newspapers.  Like a lot of leaders, Mr. Zell had more money than understanding of trends and shifting markets.  He added a few billion dollars more debt to Tribune.  By the end of 2008 Tribune was unable to meet its debt obligations, and filed for bankruptcy.

Now, new leadership has control of Tribune.  They are splitting the company in two, seperating the print and broadcast businesses.  The hope is to sell the newspapers, for which they believe there are 40 potential buyers.  Even though profits continued falling, from $156M to $89M, in just the last year. Why anyone would buy newspaper companies, which are clearly buggy whip manufacturers, is wholly unclear.  But hope springs eternal!

The new stand-alone Tribune Broadcasting company has decided to go all-in on a deal to borrow $2.7B and buy 19 additional local television stations raising total under their control to 42.

Let's see, what's the market trend in entertainment and news?  Where once we were limited to local radio and television stations for most content, now we can acquire almost anything we want – from music to TV, movies, documentaries or news – via the internet.  Rather than being subjected to what some programming executive decides to give us, we can select what we want, when we want it, and simply stream it to our laptop, tablet, smartphone, or even our large-screen TV.

A long time ago content was controlled by distribution.  There was no reason to create news stories or radio programs or video unless you had access to distribution.  Obviously, that made distribution – owning newspapers, radio and TV stations – valuable.

But today distribution is free, and everywhere.  Almost every American has access to all the news and entertainment they want from the internet. Either free, or for bite-size prices that aren't too high.  Today the value is in the content, not distribution.

In the last 2 years the number of homes without a classical TV connection (the cable) has doubled.  Sure, it's only 5% of homes now.  But the trend is pretty clear.  Even homes that have cable are increasingly not watching it as they turn to more and more streaming video.  Instead of watching a 30 minute program once per week, people are starting to watch 8 or 10 half hour episodes back to back. And when they want to watch those episodes, where they want to watch them.

While it might be easy for Tribune to ignore Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, the trend is very clear.  The need for broadcast stations like NBC or WGN or Food Network to create content is declining as we access content more directly, from more sources.  And the need to have content delivered to our home by a local affiliate station is becoming, well, an anachronism. 

Yet, Tribune's new TV-oriented leadership is doubling down on its bet for local TV's future.  Ignoring all the trends, they are borrowing more money to buy more assets that show all signs of becoming about as valuable whaling ships.  It's a big, dumb bet.  Similar to overpaying for Times-Mirror.  Some leaders just seem destined to never learn.

Compete to Win – Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, News Corp.

News Corp. executives (and shareholders) need to be worried.  Really worried.  While they are busy trying to Defend their newspaper approach, including the planned move to charge everyone a subscription fee to access the Wall Street Journal on-line, there is a competitor ready to eliminate them.  Of course, if you've read the WSJ for years you may think this sounds ridiculous.  This competitor is vying to do the same to the Financial Times, a newspaper much more popular in Europe than the USA, which already charges for on-line access.  But this competitor is serious, and just might pull it off.

According to BusinessInsider.com, "Bloomberg Redesigns Web Site as it Tries to Kill Journal."  Hiring an executive from Yahoo, Bloomberg News is "pulling the gloves off" and preparing to take on old-line competitors as it steers a course to being #1.  And the odds are looking good for its success.

The market for business news has been shifting for years.  Once this market was dominated by two delivery mechanisms.  One was very expensive, costing thousands or hundreds of dollars per month, driving information to terminals sitting at desks of traders and brokers.  The other was a daily reporting of business news through the traditional business newspapers mentioned above.  Both businesses were very profitable.

But today, almost everyone can get almost everything the expensive terminals had simply by scanning the web.  And if you can get news real-time, why wait until tomorrow?  News Corp. bought Dow Jones and has been trying to Defend the terminal business, in the face of intense Bloomberg competition for traders desks and much lower cost competition for everyone else.  In an effort to shore up the P&L at Wall Street Journal the company has announced it will reverse all industry trends and start charging for WSJ content on-line.  They still haven't figured out how to effectively take advantage of Marketwatch.com as a viable delivery mechanism for WSJ content.  An admission they don't know how to develop a robust advertising model on the web and mobile devices that will support the publication.

Don't forget, News Corp. was early to the on-line world with its acquisition of MySpace.com.  But instead of letting the people who run MySpace.com do what they needed to do to become Facebook – or possibly to become the next Marketwatch.com – News Corp. leaders interceded.  They helped "manage" MySpace and applied News Corp. Success Formula parameters to it.  MySpace was not allowed to operate as a White Space project.  Now MySpace is a narrow site mostly for musicians and artists – missing the big opportunities in social media, business/financial news or even traditional news dissemination.  Had it been given permission to do whatever it needed to succeed, permission to create a new Success Formula, who knows what MySpace might have become?

Today's marketplace will not produce acceptable returns for the old Success Formula.  But the value of good business news is growing, as all investors want to know what traders know as fast as they know it.  And that is where Bloomberg.com is headed.  It is squarely directed at building a new business that is advertiser supported which will deliver the right news to the right place fast enough to capture those who want business news.

Bloomberg is now running 2 separate businesses.  They continue to allow the terminal business to work hard as possible at defending its turf.  Simultaneously they have established a White Space project that is designed to eventually obsolete the old business.  In the process they will cannibalize the terminal business.  But they also will very likely drive less agile competitors Dow Jones and Financial Times out of business.  In the process they could capture significant ad dollars while learning how to dominate the mobile device market as well as the traditional web.

When markets shift, nobody can win by trying to Defend the old.  Customers move on, and they abandon old solutions.  Returns decline.  The winner has to use Disruptions to overcome old Lock-ins to do whatever is necessary to profitably grow!  (like having a web site that looked like an old terminal screen with amber text on a black background) and establish White Space with permission to do what is necessary to succeed! Even recognizing this may create cannibalization – but in the process learning how to earn high rates of return while crushing competitors.

Kudos to the management at Bloomberg.  They are going for the jugular in the business news marketplace, and doing so by moving where the market is headed – while other competitors are trying to Defend & Extend old ways of doing business.  It may not take Bloomberg long to create serious damage to the old institutions in business and financial news.

Crossing the Re-invention Gap – News and Chicago Tribune

Is news dying, or are newspapers dying?  That's a critical question.  Most of us know the demand for news is not dying – and if you needed reinforcement a recent McKinsey & Company study verified that the demand for news has increased (McKinsey Quarterly "A Glimmer of Hope for Newspapers").  And a lot of the increase comes from people under 35 who are escalating their news demands.  Of course, most of this increase is coming from the web and mobile media.

Too often, however, we don't see our business growing.  Instead, Lock-in to old definitions make us think our business is shrinking when it is actually doing the opposite!  And that's the Re-invention Gap.  Manufacturers of small printing presses said demand was declining in the 1970s, when in fact demand for copies was exploding.  Only the explosion was from xerography instead of presses.  So A.B. Dick and Multigraphics, small offset press manufacturers, went out of business when demand for the output of their product was exploding!  The market shifted, but it kept growing, and they missed the shift.

Today we see this behavior in most news publishersThose who print newspapers and magazines are talking about how horrible business is.  Only the demand for news is growing more quickly than ever.  It's just not demand for print, which arrives too late for many customers.  And because print is too slow a distribution method for these customers, advertisers are abandoning print as well.  But only if you're Locked-in to printing do you say the market is horrible.  Because with demand for news growing, if you reposition yourself to serve the growing part of the market you should say business is great! 

Tribune Corporation, owner of The Chicago Tribune newspaper is still in bankruptcy.  And its future relies entirely on how well it will serve the needs of on-line news readers.  According to Crain's Chicago Business, in "Former Sports Editor Bill Adee Steers Chicago Tribune's On-line Strategy" print advertising revenues fell by 9% versus last year in the most recent quarter.  And according to a quoted investment banker, nobody would have much interest in the value of a print newspaper.  That business is destined to keep declining.

But simultaneously the volume of on-line ads tripled!  And that's what a business has to do to cross its Re-invention Gap.  It has to move from the old business into the new business – from the declining elements of its business into the growth elements.

What most businesses do wrong is try to apply their old business model to the new business.  The old Success Formula has Lock-ins to metrics, schedules, processes, frequent decisions, decision-makers, strategic plans, etc. which the leadership tries to apply to the new business.  For example, most newspapers are used to selling ads for several thousand dollars, based upon the number of subscribers.  These are pretty large price points.  But on-line, ads are sold per page view or per click.  Now we're talking pennies sometimes.  And to make money, you have to get a lot of views. Likewise, newspapers work on a 24 hour cycle of news accumulation and publishing, whereas the internet is 24×7 with the opportunity to change headlines and what's reported continuously.  If a newspaper tries to apply the old Success Formulas related to sales, pricing and editorial process they fail.

And that's why crossing the re-invention gap requires a big Disruption.  You have to get the organization to understand that while you are managing the old business, it is destined to eventually go under.  So you have to be prepared to Disrupt the Lock-ins, to discover a new way to do the business.  And that can only happen if there is a White Space team dedicated to building a business the way the new marketplace will pay for it.  Totally separated from the old business.  And exactly the opposite of what Tribune is doing by placing the team in the middle of the old newsroom!

At Tribune, one of the big problems is not only the ad pricing model and news scheduling, but the fact that the leadership is still trying to drive content like they did at the newspaper.  Over a decade ago Tribune took a direction of accumulating less news on its own, and as a result it republished lots of content.  But now on the internet republishing (or content aggregation as it is called on-line) is far less valuable because readers can go to the source.  There are thousands and thousands of aggregators – making competition intense and profits negligible.  Why page view a Chicago Tribune web page that's feeding info from the New York Times or Marketwatch or MSNBC when you can go directly to the New York Times or Marketwatch or MSNBC and get it yourself – possibly with other interesting sidebars?  Succeeding in the new market requires developing an entirely new Success Formula – which Tribune Company has not done.  It's still trying to find that magical "leverage" which will allow it to preserve its "history" (its old Success Formula) while tiptoeing into the new marketplace.

I don't know any newspaper or magazine publisher that has really attacked its Lock-ins, really Disrupted, or set up a true White Space team to explore how to make money in the growing new news market.  News Corp. had the chance when it bought MySpace.com, but failed as it destroyed the MySpace business by "helping" its leadership.  This market requires understanding how to get the news and report it cheaply and very fast, to computer and mobile device users.  That is necessary to obtain the traffic which would be valuable to advertisers.  And simultaneously the new team must package ad sales so as to maximize revenues from page views.  Most are far too reliant on single ad sales, and not effectively linking the right ads to the right pages to generate more click-throughs as well as views.

Re-invention Gaps emerge because we let Lock-in blind us to growth opportunities.  We define the business around the Lock-ins (such as printing a newspaper) rather than defining it around what the market wants (news.)  Then when revenues stumble, starting a growth stall, the energy goes into preserving the old Success Formula (and its Lock-ins) first with cost cuts, and later with efforts to "synergize" or "leverage" the old Success Formula into the new market.  And this never works.  The growing part of the market is entirely different, and requires developing an entirely new Success Formula.  That's why even in growing markets businesses fail, unless they commit to Dis
rupting the Lock-in and using White Space to move back into the growth Rapids.
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