Manage To Change

YouTube and Poetry

My son told me he hated poetry.

I showed him this.

He wanted to show his teacher but YouTube is blocked at school.

That’s too bad.

It was a poem he liked!

Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo

For the second time this year I was at the Web 2.0 Expo and missed Clay Shirky’s presentation, but thank God for the Internet!

Here are Clay’s presentations.  They are both worth watching but if you’re a publisher, and you only have time for one, invest the 16 minutes and 20 seconds needed to view the San Francisco talk.

In SF Clay discussed our natural human propensity to consume, produce, and share.

Publishing and media have traditionally only addressed consumption. Production was too complicated and expensive to enable mass participation.  Sharing was severely limited by time and space.

Web 2.0 technologies have begun to address production and sharing by minimizing those constraints.

In New York, the topic was “Filter Failure.”  Since the first day the number of books available exceeded the amount a person could read in their life, there has been an information explosion.

His point is the filters we have traditionally applied to regulate the information we choose to consume have failed.  They can’t simply be scaled.  They must be re-architected.

Special bonus feature: Shirky at Harvard.

GIIS: Colin Hughes, The End of Newspapers as We Knew Them

Colin Hughes, Managing Director of The Guardian Professional presented the keynote at GIIS Thursday morning.

To understand The Guardian, Colin believes you must understand its roots.

John Edward Taylor, after witnessing the Peterloo Massacre, feared that Parliament would not get an accurate report from the press.  He wrote an account himself and got his report into Parliament before any press reports had been received. The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 two years after this event.

From the beginning, The Guardian existed to challenge authority.

CP Scott was the editor for more than 50 years and bought the paper in the early 1900’s.  Upon his death, fearing the newspaper’s safety and independence might someday become vulnerable, his heirs created the Scott Trust by forfeiting their inheritance.

According to Colin, “newspaper companies are simply unprofitable.”

While The Guardian may have been “least hit hard,” the decline of print and an advertising recession has left their marks. But rather than worry what they need to cut, The Guardian’s philosophy is to determine “what are we going to look like coming out of this.”

From 1999 to 2007, The Guardian’s online readership rose to over 21M users per month and is expected to more than double by 2020.

Apart from the BBC, The Guardian is the only news service increasing their coverage of foreign events. Most of their online readers are outside of the UK. 

In fact, 5.7M of them are in the US.

Colin feels the Americans like them because The Guardian is “distinctive, authentic, trusted, and original.”

“Everything that we are naturally associated with…is what those readers want…rather than respond to these challenges by shrinking we’re in a fantastic position to expand what we do.”

The lesson: Opportunities to expand are present but they may not be where we’ve traditionally expected them to be.

GIIS: Ammy Vogtlander of BlueInsights

Ammy Vogtlander, Managing Director of BlueInsights, participated in a panel discussion on copyright at the Global Information Industry Summit (GIIS).

According to Ammy, networks of people with common interests (like LinkedIn), information sharing communities (like YouTube or SharePoint), and groups that organize information (like Connotea) are merging.  That’s why she co-founded BlueInsights.

As these groups and tools converge to enable “social discovery,” networks increasing become potential content discovery platforms.

And with ease of discovery come issues around copyright.

Different platforms have taken different approaches to protecting copyright.  You tube, for example, is reactive.  They take down infringing content if there is a complaint.
 
MS SharePoint doesn’t really do anything to prevent infringement.

There have been other companies (like Ezmo - no longer in business) that interpret copyright themselves and limit the number of people with whom someone can share copyrighted material.

While publishers often see online communities as a threat, Ammy fears that they may be underestimating their value as a forum for peer recommendation.

She also believes there are opportunities to develop standards to minimize copyright infringement and that, addressed correctly, online sharing as a form of promotion can generate quality traffic and increase revenues.

Read more about GIIS Day One on the Really Strategies Blog.

GIIS Keynote: Hugo Dixon from Breakingviews.com

Wednesday, the Global Information Industry Summit (GIIS), started with a keynote by Hugo Dixon, Editor in Chief and Chairman of Breakingviews.com (BV), a fully electronic publication of real time financial analysis.

“For me content is indeed King,” says Hugo and he believes in charging for it.  BV sells team and enterprise subscriptions, can boast 5 million subscribers, and reports a 95% renewal rate the first half of 2008.

With a strong initial launch, early partnerships with newspapers, a commitment to recruiting and developing top talent, and now 8 years of consistent insights, Breakingviews.com has become a strong brand.

According to Hugo, BV’s strength is its commitment to producing “agenda setting insight.”

BV seeks not only to be first to offer their views, but they also value their subscriber’s time, remain independent, and try to be entertaining.

The key to BV success has been recognizing that the professional market is very different from the consumer market.  Professionals value quality AND they’re willing to pay for it.

Read more about GIIS Day One on the Really Strategies Blog.

GIIS London

This week I'm attending the Global Information Industry Summit (GIIS) in London. 

I'll put some posts together on the plane tomorrow for this blog and the Really Strategies blog.

In the mean time, follow me on Twitter if you're interested in this event. 

A plan gives us something to change

Creating an execution plan forces us to consider options and alternatives, weigh current information, and make decisions. 

Without perfect information, however, those decisions are an educated guess.

Today, with fast moving markets, the information explosion, and people getting stretched thinner as “project resources”, priorities are in constant flux and plans that span beyond days are almost guaranteed to need adjustment.

Does that mean we shouldn’t plan?

Absolutely not!

It means that the role of planning has changed.  And even more importantly, the role of those managing plans has changed.

Practical Advice
When possible create shorter duration project plans, measured in weeks. Understand that beyond a certain time horizon, the plan becomes less concrete.

Don’t beat dead horses.  In areas where there are unknowns or change is probable, consider the two or three most likely outcomes, build the plan to address them, and move on.

Simplify complex situations into actionable items.

Reassess planned actions continuously.  Collaborate on and communicate all required changes.

Redefine failure. Missing a date on a plan is not failure.  Failure occurs when we don’t incorporate new information and continue down an outdated and incorrect path.

And finally, the best known advice for project planning: Under promise and over deliver!

Disclaimers
This isn’t easy and requires both intuition and analysis.

Redefining failure is very dangerous.  Spinning our wheels and producing nothing is certainly not success either.  We need to discriminate between legitimate flexibility and the inability to execute.

There are many different kinds of projects with different levels of unknowns. 

• The plan for a product development effort in an emerging market will likely change a great deal.  It should be planned as a series of small steps and evaluations. 
• A project to implement a well established software system may have fewer unknowns and should change less. 

Now it’s your turn.

Do you have practical advice or disclaimers to add?

Back in London

It’s always colder than I think it will be - even when I look at the forecast.

My first stop is Ryman (don’t ask me why – I’m just addicted to office supplies).

My second stop is Boots to stock up on all the pain relievers that I can’t get over the counter in the US (you can get codeine OTC here!).

My first trip to Starbucks reminds me that they don’t have Equal and no one uses “half and half” - so I have to switch to lattes and get my own Equal.

It takes me at least a day to remember to walk on the left side of the sidewalk and another day before I start looking in the proper direction when crossing the street.

Everyone writes dates backwards.  Although, since the US is the only country that writes dates MM-DD-YY, I suppose we’re the ones that are backwards.

Common words and phrases are used differently and almost everyone has a better vocabulary than I do. 

What does this have to do with change?

Being here makes me think more carefully.  It makes me listen more closely.

It reminds me both that sometimes when things look the same they aren’t, and other times when things sound different they’re actually very similar.

It makes transparent some of the basic assumptions under which I continually operate.

Understanding our assumptions, biases, and expectations are absolutely required before we can change (ourselves or our environment).

This is really good practice!

Photo from About.com