This blog is a collection of notes, thoughts, links and general scratches on something that has become a bit of a professional obsession: namely what companies do (or don’t do) when they find themselves fundamentally threatened – or disrupted – by the internet.
I hesitate over the use of the word ‘threatened’ – because it carries such emotive connotations. If you see something as a threat, you behave primarily out of fear – and fear-based strategies tend not to work – on the internet or anywhere else, for that matter.
At the same time, simply branding everything as an exciting opportunity (as I have to admit I’ve tended to do a bit in the past) is, frankly, happy-clappy nonsense.
In truth, there are threats and opportunities out there a plenty. The right frame of mind is a healthy mix of fear and excitement. Too much fear and you will never really do anything; too much excitement and you will do a lot, but achieve very little. Get them working together – and there’s a chance that something exciting will happen.
So, I prefer to use the slightly more neutral term ‘disruption’ because thanks to all the work by Clayton Christensen in his books, The Innovators Dilemma and The Innovators Solution it defines the problem quite neatly [I'm not quite sure they've nailed the solution, but more of that elsewhere].
The ‘Digital’ bit adds an extra twist this. The internet has brought a wave of disruption of particular speed, ingenuity and ferocity. Never have so many businesses in so many sectors and so many countries found themselves disrupted at the same time. That’s what makes it so interesting.
Much is written of the disruptors – because that story is, frankly, much easier to grasp and often more energising. It is an exciting tale of innovation.
Incumbents meanwhile have much bigger challenges – ultimately they have no alternative but to undergo a quite fundamental transformation. They can’t start with a blank sheet of paper. And they have no alternative but to start with the brands, businesses and people they have got – for better or worse. What they should have done five years ago is utterly irrelevant. They have to ’start from here’.
The point is – when you’re inside a business going through this, it’s really, really tough. You are trading a proud past for a very uncertain future. That is a difficult job – but it is also unavoidable one – and an important one. At stake collectively are thousands and thousands of jobs; brands that have survived for decades and trillions of investors’ dollars.
I’ve had a fair amount of first hand experience of this. For the last decade or so, my job has been the new media bit of an old media group. I was the Guardian’s Director of Digital Publishing, now I’m the Director of Digital Strategy for the Guardian Media Group.
I’m also currently chair of the UK Association of Online Publishers – the majority of whose members are all going through this process. And I have a non-exec role with the Swedish yellow pages company, Eniro – and if there is a sector that can see both the threats and the opportunities offered by the internet to a directory business, it is directories.
So, my day job is UK media – but my interest goes beyond both the UK and the media industry – and so, I hope will this blog. The three companies I follow most closely are Kodak, Encyclopedia Britannica and Blockbuster; and I’m also interested in the music and movie industries; software and retail. No doubt as I dig a little deeper with this blog, I’ll hopefully start to delve into the worlds of financial services, travel and government – all of which have had to deal with this.
It’s also important to realise that the cycle of disruption never quite stops. An internet or digital business is just as capable of being disrupted by another internet business as the traditional businesses that it originally disrupted were.
And, even those ostensibly digital businesses are not immune. I wrote this intro on Google Docs. A few years ago, it would have been in Microsoft Word. How, I wonder, will that little bit of digital disruption play out?
Where does this all head. Well, it might, or might not be a book or a fat chunk of powerpoint. Failing that, I might grind to a halt in a matter of days. Let’s see how it goes.
SW
12 August 08
