Reading through a couple of articles by Ruth Spellman, Chief Executive of the Chartered Management Institute, a few issues she raises rang alarm bells, and I imagine they will do for hundreds of people across the UK’s publishing industry.

In an article about management style Ruth wrote.

If we are serious about pushing the UK towards economic recovery, businesses need to be innovative, accessible and empowering. It’s what employees need and want.”

Ruth Spellman, 2010

I couldn’t agree more, Ruth.

Detailing the plight of the managers Ruth goes on in another recent article to detail the following.

Yes, managers are currently under a great deal of pressure to restore their organisations back to pre-recession health, but there are no excuses for pushing employees so hard that the health of the individual is sacrificed for the health of the business. Work should be a place where people are built up, not broken down.”

Ruth Spellman, 2010

Read the last sentence again, it’s remarkable but it really shouldn’t be, it should be standard practice; we should take it for granted this will happen.

“Work should be a place where people are built up, not broken down.”

Imagine working in a business where the driving force was to build up employees, make them better, bring them a wealth of experience and look after them. That would be good for employees and for the business, especially in these hard times.

The requirement for good management steps up a level and becomes a lot more serious when you look at the implications bad management can have on the health of employees and what that means for the business.

If employers need a financial incentive to develop smarter processes to avoid putting pressure on their workforces to deliver more for less, they should bear in mind that presenteeism — underperforming at work due to ill-health or stress — costs the economy £15bn each year, almost double the cost of absenteeism. This fact alone should encourage employers to do more to manage increased workloads, keeping morale and staff productivity levels up.”

Ruth Spellman, 2010

Management is a two-way thing. Most managers don’t get this, they don’t realise they are managing humans, they think they are just managing a spreadsheet. Most managers don’t innovate, and they aren’t accessible or empowering because they don’t understand the employer/employee equation involves delicate unpredictable human emotions not raw data, which can be manipulated at the click of a button to tell them what they want.

And why does this happen? Because only one in five managers have any type of professional management qualification. A lack of qualified managers has bred a class of authoritarian, bureaucratic and secretive managers obsessed only with the maintenance of their own seniority. This doesn’t work, it isn’t productive, and it ultimately leads to failure for all involved.

All employers have a duty of care to employees and are legally required to assess the risk of work-related stress, it is a duty of care the UK publishing industry does not take seriously, this needs to change if the task managers have of “restoring their organisations back to pre-recession health” is to be achieved.

In an industry that has taken big hits and suffered harshly at the hands of the recession we need innovative, accessible, honest and open managers who can create an environment where the people left after the streamlining process of the last two years can be built up and bring the UK’s publishing industry a new lease of life.

You wouldn’t expect a broken lens to take a perfect picture, it will take one, but it will come out looking like half the image it could have been, even if the person processing the image isn’t making a mistake.

A lack of clarity is a very real and present danger in publishing, without leaders and working environments that provide clarity products fail their audiences, and businesses fail their employees; breaking the duty of care that is legally afforded to them, which results in stress and anxiety in the workplace. This is not acceptable in any circumstances.

Without a working environment that aspires to deliver its product or service with clarity of thought and vision at all levels, the only result can be a failure to meet the product’s maximum potential.

Clarity must come in 4 areas to avoid failure:

1. Clarity of communication:
   Communication chains must be clear and open. Nobody must be hidden and nothing covert.
2. Clarity of strategy:
   A strategy needs to be unambiguous, focused and forthright.
3. Clarity of planning:
   Planning must seek to deliver on the answers the strategy is finding for the business.
4. Clarity of execution:
   Plans must reach those who execute them in a clear framework so all objectives are met.

A lack of clarity in any of these areas will play havoc when trying to deliver a media product. Decisions will be hard to make, then misunderstood and not executed correctly.

It is not a clear management strategy to keep people in the dark, avoid talking to them and conduct one’s self in a manner other than that which leads to amicable understanding.

Media products are complicated, they require editorial, commercial and technical input. Due to this complex nature the need for clarity in operational procedures is vital to assure products meet their full and unadulterated potential.

Let me be clear:

A lack of clarity is a fatal black hole, which will swallow up everything in its path and end in disaster for publisher and audience.

I watched this video of Rishad Tobaccowala (Chief Innovation Officer at Publicis) this morning and it really resonated with me.

Rishad discusses the important role talented people play in building and sustaining successful creative businesses. Talent is so critically important but seems so inexplicably overlooked and undervalued in the publishing industry.

I truly believe that the industry and the companies that have a disproportionate share of passionate talent will beat everybody.”

Rishad Tobaccowala, 2010

So do I, Rishad.

During these times when the publishing industry has the potential to enter a renaissance; brimming with new opportunities, it will only be the companies with a talented, motivated and inspired team that will taste true success.

How do you motivate and inspire talent?

The next generation (my generation of 20 something ambitious professionals) want wealth. As Rishad explains we want three kinds of wealth.

1. Experiential wealth
Give me an opportunity now and make it exciting.

2. Educational wealth
Surround me with good people and teach me.

3. Economic wealth
Pay me appropriately and allow me skin in the game.

If the next generation of talent are not given the opportunity to grow their wealth in these ways they will find somewhere else to build. This will be the death of the professional publishing industry. No builders, no products, nothing to sell, no money made, business dies.

The publishing industry is in flux, which makes it difficult to provide this triple play of wealth to the next generation of talent because it is predominantly tied up and focused at the previous generation who are motivated and incentivised by building and maintaining their own seniority.

Unfortunately the value in real terms of the previous generation during the renaissance is completely out-of-sync with their price tag when compared to the talent that will make the new business models, which are so frequently speculated on, a reality.

I’ll finish with another quote from Rishad, which perfectly sums up how I feel the publishing industry should be thinking.

Let’s get back to the audacity and the dreams, and you know what, the spreadsheets will fill up beautifully.”

Rishad Tobaccowala, 2010

Every facet of the publishing industry stems from talent. Nothing else even comes close. If you don’t sit up and recognise that your business is a Dodo.

(Via Cultural Fuel)

I’ve just got back from watching Avatar in 3D at the Imax. It was an incredibly immersive experience and the effects were brilliant. Having said that, as a story it’s really no better than any other well made blockbuster. So why has it taken so much money at the box office and why are audiences all over the world so excited about it?

It’s already the second highest grossing film of all time and will soon topple Cameron’s last outing, Titanic, from the top spot after its 12 year stint at number 1.

Avatar has done so well because James Cameron is a master at disrupting the market in which he operates and always improves his product in a way that the audience do not expect, but which is of benefit to the experience of it. This excites the audience and gets bums on sets in the cinema.

Cameron has raised the bar yet again for special effects blockbusters to meet. His competitors, while being impressed with the splendour of his work, must be wondering how they can compete. That’s simple, make a better film, and they will, but they’ll need to use the technology he has invented and use the studios he has built to do it. That is until they come up with their own disruptive innovation.

There is no point in even thinking about scaling our businesses to try and theoretically increase profits without first getting our products in the right condition to fit their contemporary marketplace. You need the right people in place to make this happen. People who care about and understand their audience, are aware of the latest developments in technology and know how to apply these developments to positive effect.

Too frequently the wrong people are put in place to try and bring success to a business which needs to make these changes. Reading Mike Hirshland’s blog post, How to Kill a Startup: Hire Executives instead of Entrepreneurs, this became glaringly obvious.

Whereas later stage successful startups typically should be run by executives who excel at scaling a business and its organization, early stage BPMF (Before Product Market Fit) startups typically are best off being led by highly entrepreneurial founders with great product sensibilities.

Mike Hirshland, 2009

Although Mike’s post is talking about his experience as a venture capitalist working with tech startups, his way of thinking is perfectly applicable to all businesses which find themselves at the bottom of their product lifecycle curve, because at the bottom of the curve we are all a startup. It is at this point we need to develop a VC frame-of-mind and invest in the right people to restart our product lifecycle.

I have full faith in the fact that audiences in the UK and around the world crave the products we are capable of delivering to them and there is a profitable marketplace in which we can play, but fitting with that marketplace and having the right product is key and this can only be achieved with entrepreneurs pressing the reset button, not executives.

Inspired by VCMIKE’S BLOG via Read Write Web

I want to think about two recent posts made by the brilliant Seth Godin and how they apply to the way the publishing industry should think about evolving to meet the needs of the distant future not simply look at what we will be doing around the corner.

Most of us assume a single range of focus that we care about. And it’s usually right around the corner, or even closer. Is that the place to be focusing your brand or your business or your life?”

How far away is your future?, Seth Godin, December 27, 2009

If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.

Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever.

“If your ship is sinking, get out now. By the time the rats start packing, it’s way too late.”

It’s not the rats you need to worry about, Seth Godin, December 28, 2009

Godin has a way of distilling ideas that are difficult to grasp into that which make perfect sense, he has certainly done that here.

With hardcopy periodical circulation still in a decline that is irreversible (they’ve abandoned the newsagent. It’s over, as Godin might say) what value will these publications have in 10 years time? What will the audience look like? What will the editorial teams look like? Where will they be working from? Who will they be reporting to? In 3 months even in a year the answers to these question will be the same as you would get tomorrow. In 10 years time the answers will be very different. It’s those answers we need to be thinking about now in order to evolve faster than those against which we compete.

The decline is too steep to be the end of a normal life-cycle, 2009 has been a 10 year storm, a fundamental innovation needs to occur to recover. As Steve Ballmer said in June “I don’t think we are in a recession, I think we have reset,” he said. “A recession implies recovery [to pre-recession levels] and for planning purposes I don’t think we will. We have reset and won’t rebound and re-grow.” All content consumed will be digital, we can [only] debate if that may be in one, two, five or 10 years,” added Ballmer.

There are already opportunities that might be presenting the green shoots of growth, but they are already here, they’re just around the corner if we want them (iphone apps etc). We should not just be looking around the corner for the answers but over the horizon.

Natural selection applies in business as it does in nature, the first to evolve and meet the new requirements of the environment in which we compete will win, the others will die.

Budgets have been cut, teams restructured and roles changed for thousands of workers in the publishing industry. Are we all clear on what we are doing or are we distracted and constrained by the additional packaging processes we are now burdened with?

I’m reading my second Seth Godin book at the moment, Small is the new big, which contains this post originally made on his blog  in 2005. It is entitled “Godin’s Leveraged Effort Curve” and explains how as our career progresses we spend more time on packaging what we are doing and less time actually doing it.

An insightful web designer spends just a few minutes a day actually doing insightful web design.

“The baseline level of talent in most professions is pretty high, and the really exceptional people shine only rarely.

There’s too much overhead. A doctor needs to fill out forms, meet salespeople, answer phone calls, travel from hospital to hospital, manager her staff and every once in a while, see a patient. And most of those patients are run of the mill cases that a medical student could handle.

“As you get better at what you do, it seems as though you spend more and more time on the packaging and less on the doing.”

Seth Godin, 2005

It’s an interesting post and one which I feel I can easily identify with.

With this massive change that has occurred over the past 12 months the amount of packaging knowledge workers have to plough though in order to deliver their valuable insight has grown to the extent at which we are engaged in a game of pass the parcel in which the knowledge is packaged with so many layers when it is finally unwrapped it seems disappointing.

To improve the productivity of knowledge workers in the publishing industry we need to reduce the overheads and ship knowledge with a single layer of packaging which can be easily removed and even recycled.

From a reporting point of view this is fine but from an editorial and production point of view this is a year to stop thinking about users and start thinking about an audience.

The mindset we are in when thinking about users is nondescript, impersonal, cold and distant. We need to do something to readdress this relationship.

The problem exists across the online publishing industry, because we are now so used to reporting ‘user’ numbers our products are developed to serve the need to build these user numbers and not foster an audience of readers and viewers. Users find our content through a search engine, decide if it’s what they are after, quickly read/watch it then leave, most likely returning to Google to start another search. My worry with this sort of user behaviour is that there is clearly no engagement with the brand, which we would traditionally have seen with an audience that perhaps subscribed to a magazine or picked up the same newspaper everyday.

The future of all brand aligned commercial or digital subscription activity will be built on the solid foundations of an engaged audience. With this in mind I believe the transient users entering from and exiting to Google are losing value faster than an investment in the Dubai property market.

1. An industry wide obsession with views (be they page views or video views). They will just happen, don’t let them be an outright focus it will distract from the more important goals.

2. Indecisive decision making. Plans need to be made, decisions taken and work done. Quickly.

3. Backward thinking. We need to change what we are doing and the way we are doing it, not do more of the same thing in the same way.

4. Brands ignoring the conversation they’ve started. If you purport to represent an audience talk with them, don’t talk at them.

5. Feeling underappreciated and under-rewarded. Individually and collectively teams are inappropriately rewarded and motivated by an industry that has lost touch with what brings and creates value, how teams are managed and how goals are set which motivate self-improvement.

Distractions like this will take away from more important objectives, which should serve to create a higher quality of audience engagement. This new engaged audience will help us rebuild our brands and transform our business models.

Efficiently delivering your product will mean it is built to be Small, Simple and easily Shared. These pillars can form a foundation to re-evaluate what you are trying to achieve and what the future holds for your product and business.

Small: Look at the most high profile web business of the year, Twitter, it sets out to do one thing well: it broadcasts small messages accross multimple platforms. It doesn’t try to over complicate its proposition and becuase of that it has been massively sucessful in growing an engaged audience.

The publishing industry should look at web businesses like Twitter for operational inspriation and slim down their offering so it is focused, reliably delivered and offers users multiple touch points, which they control. Concentrate on your core verticlals and break them out into separate websites if nessessary.

Simple: The more complicated you make your product the less likely an audience are to identify with it. They are also not likely to return regularly if they dont know what they are going to get.

Look for ways to slim down and lose sections that you don’t maintain regularly. This will make your product simple to maintain from an editorial point of view and simple to access from an audience point of view. The time saved by this simplification will free up your editorial team to focus on delivering your audience what they actually want, more regularly.

Shared: This is possibly the most difficult to implement but also the most important in order to build an audience that are engaged with your product and actively want to engage in helping you grow your audience.

Facebook Connect and Twitter API integrations are going to be massive in 2010. They will help grow an engaged audience for your content and strengthen your brand.

Being “Small” and “Simple” does not mean you will dumb down and lose out. It will mean that you are refined and easy for your audience to identify with. This will strengthen your brand and grow your audience.

This simplification isn’t easyily attainable and carries a new set of challenges, it does however allow you to try out new ideas and find a clear path down which you can grow your product, audience and business over the next decade.