MOVED

I have moved this blog to:

http://managetochange.typepad.com/main/

Please come and visit!

Ann

A Whole New Mind: Design

Design is the first of the six Concept Age senses that we’re going to explore. Dan Pink quotes John Heskett when describing design as “a combination of utility and significance”.

Utility is something that is prevalent in the market today. Unless you’re on the bleeding edge, most products do what they say they’re supposed to do with reasonable consistency. Utility is not how to differentiate a product. Significance is.

I went to a friend’s house last weekend and she had the neatest measuring cup (yes, I used “neatest” and “measuring cup” in the same sentence – that’s significant right there!).

Unlike the hundreds of measuring cups you may have seen before, this cup did the job of measuring (utility) but in an unusual way (significance). The bottom of the cup angled up so that you could read the numbers without holding it up or bending down for a better view. I already have a couple of measuring cups, but this cup’s great design makes it worth buying.

Design makes use of holistic thinking, focused on solving a problem, in a way that is significant to the customer. According to Dan, “Design is a high concept aptitude that is difficult to outsource or automate – and that increasingly confers a competitive advantage in business”.

Design sense is not limited to product developers and marketers either. Everything we use or produce is designed. This blog has a design, as does a business case, a request for proposal, your office, and a presentation you need to make to a client. The list is infinite.

Dan offers several suggestions for strengthening your design sense. “Channel Your Annoyance” is an exercise where you find a product that bothers you and, with nothing but a pad and pencil, you redesign it. Another neat exercise is “Put it on a Table” where you take something that you “connect with” on some emotional level and answer a series of questions to determine why. He also includes a list of design magazines and museums you can explore.

Good design is “giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing” – did you think you were missing a great measuring cup?

I didn’t!

Adam's Day At Work

Here's what Adam had to say about working with me today (HE wrote this!):

Hi, I am Adam. I am in 6th grade, and go to Springfield Middle School. Today was take your child to work day, so I stayed home with my mom since she works at home. I had a fun experience at my mom's work today.

My mom does three important things to run her business. She must have work (customers and partners), get work (business development), and learn things (professional development). These three things are a cycle. You learn a lot of things; you meet people who might give you jobs. Having more jobs helps you learn.

My mom gets her work through customers and partners. Customers are people who give her work to do. Partners are people who share work with her.

Professional Development is learning about current events. It is also going to conferences, or training classes. The way she learns the most is by working.

Some people like staying the way they are. When changes come, they don’t want to change. Eventually, these people are forced to change, and when they do, it is a lot harder then if they changed before. Now other people look ahead and prepare for the same changes. When the changes come, they will be ready. These people are happy and excited when the changes come. My mom helps those people who don’t want to change.

I would want to work at home because I could save more time in the morning by not having to drive to my office. Another reason is that I could never forget something at my house, I would be there. Finally, because I could take a 20-30 minute break.

Take Your Child to Work Day

My son came up to me last night and said “Mom, tomorrow is take your child to work day”. Before he could finish I started laughing “so you want to stay home. Nice try!”

Then I thought about it. Why was my first assumption that he wanted to watch TV and play video games all day? Is that what employers think working at home involves? Shame on me!

Why shouldn’t he understand that working from home has its own set of demands, rewards, and complications?

So…Adam is home today. He is getting a few lessons on what I do, how to run a business, and he’s organizing all of my reading material (as you might have imagined, I have a TON of reading material).

He’s also feeding the dogs, keeping the laundry running, and dealing with any other interruptions that might arise. He’s learning that in my life there aren’t hard lines between business and everything else. Personally, that’s how I like it.

When he’s done today, he has to write a blog entry – so we’ll get to see what he thinks about working this way!

A Whole New Mind: Senses

In my last entry I said that we’d be talking about the skills needed to be successful in the Concept Age. Actually, in A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink refers to senses. This is an important distinction.

Normally, we can all see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Some of us have more heightened sensitivities than others, but we’ve been born with these abilities.

A sense can also be amplified. Think of someone with an affinity for wine. Through innate ability AND training they may become a connoisseur.

The six Concept Age senses (design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning) are similar. We are all born with these abilities and through use (or lack thereof) we can alter our proficiency with them.

Like the five physical senses, no one sense is better than the other. They all provide our brains with information that we use to interpret a situation and decide how to act.

Dan covers each of theses aptitudes in a separate chapter of the book. Each chapter is broken into a section describing the sense and its application to the Concept Age and a section that gives us concrete things that we can do – exercises – to increase our sensitivity in each area.

I am going to follow his lead.

So – I have some homework to do! As soon as I finish a “design” sense exercise or two, I’ll tell you about design – the first Concept Age sense.

A Whole New Mind

Dan Pink’s new book, A Whole New Mind, introduces so many important ideas that I’ll be doing a series of blog entries on it. Consider the next several posts your cliffs notes!

Dan’s premise (and the subtitle of the book) is that we are moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

The Information Age has been the age of the knowledge worker. We made our living by acquiring and applying knowledge. The activities that brought us success (and an income!) were centered on the left-brain: sequential, textual, detail-oriented, analytical, and focused on the “hard” facts.

In an age when automation can replace the knowledge worker for simple rule-based tasks, outsourcing to Asia can satisfy more complicated activities, and an abundance of facts are available to anyone with a browser, what is the knowledge worker to do?

Enter the Conceptual Age, a time marked by the rise in significance of right-brain thinking. Creativity, context, the “big picture”, pattern recognition, and synthesis are becoming more important than simply knowing and applying facts.

Dan has identified six skills we will need to develop to be successful in the Concept Age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Defining, identifying, and building these skills will be the topics of my next six posts.

While we explore this book, remember that it isn’t about left-brain versus right-brain. It’s about – A Whole New Mind.

NOT By Invitation Only!

I’ve been struck recently by how easily you can join just about any conversation.

In the last several months I’ve been connecting with people I barely know, commenting on blogs, and writing this one. I am interacting with people all over the country and I’m more in tune with colleagues now than when I went to an office every day.

Why is that?

Sure, there are more technologies that enable interaction and collaboration - but did that spark my participation or did something else change?

I believe it's because I finally decided to get involved. And when I did there was a whole suite of technologies that enabled me to do so (some of which I’ve already covered in past posts).

But my point here is that no one is stopping you from joining any conversation.

Technology has made it tough to come up with a good excuse to stay on the sidelines – but was there ever really a good one anyway?

Compromise

Purple Cow has really gotten me thinking about compromise in product development.

As Seth Godin writes, “Compromise is about sanding down the rough edges to gain buy-in from other constituencies. Vanilla is a compromise ice cream flavor…But vanilla is boring. You can’t build a fast-growing company around vanilla.”

Well, the problem is that you can’t anymore!

Compromise generally worked when the focus was on mass markets. It was how you could be “appealing enough” to large numbers of people.

At the annual SIIA Content Division meeting earlier this year Neil Budde, General Manager of Yahoo! news, talked about how information has always been distributed in bundles. Creating that bundle involved compromise. It had to cater to the largest part of the audience consuming it in order to keep circulation up and keep advertisers interested. Compromise was profitable - until there was a more accessible and customizable alternative to the bundle.

When online news came along, people started to consume only the portion of the offering that appealed to them. They suddenly had many options to fulfill a broader spectrum of their interests and these options weren’t all created by traditional journalists!

Suddenly consumers could act as their own filter, not relying on professionals to determine their choices. Consumers started selecting information for themselves and sharing those choices with others (go look at: del.icio.us, flickr, and squidoo).

With all of these exciting options, how can we expect people to continue to buy the static bundle for the masses? People are moving past that now.

It’s no longer about compromise, it’s about being remarkable!

Who’s accountable?

In my last post I advocated forgetting irrelevant rules and making your own decisions. That might sound a little ridiculous to some, but consider this:

Only you are responsible for your actions. Sure, doing what you’re told might give you a great excuse, but does it absolve you from your responsibility to use your brain? I don’t think so.

Who’s to say that it’s really any safer following orders? While advocating that you forget the stupid rules may sound radical on the surface, it really isn’t.

It’s not an all or nothing situation. You don’t just ignore the rules all the time or follow them blindly.

Not all the rules are stupid or irrelevant and you’re accountable for the decisions you make.

That’s why you have to think.

What are rules for anyway?

Rules replace thought. If you know the rules, you always know what to do.

Rules are comfortable. If you know the rules, you never have to stretch too far.

Rules are safe. You probably won’t get fired for following the rules.

Unfortunately, you probably won’t make much progress either.

Rules work when the rate of change is slow enough that they can be adjusted before they are irrelevant.

Can you think of some irrelevant rules in your company?

Worse than irrelevant, what rules are getting in the way of your company’s success?

When do you sit (usually with your colleagues!) and debate the rules rather than taking the actions you know are right?

Ask someone about those rules.

If you can’t find any meaning in them – ignore them.

Do what you think is right - what will make your company be more successful.

Forget the stupid rules!

THINK!!!

Who are your customers?

A couple of weeks ago in a posting on Tom Peters’ blog (look in March archives for the entry “Refine to Simplicity”, March 10th), Steve Yastrow proposed that customers are:

Anyone whose actions affect your results

In an information creation and management organization, how differently would you treat content providers (authors) if you considered them your customers? In any organization, how would you treat employees or partners? They affect your results.

Last week (March 28, 2006), EPS (Electronic Publishing Services, Ltd.) wrote an Insight entitled “Google the Bookseller”. The article focused on how Google’s digital bookselling models could help bring innovation to digital publishing.

What interested me was seeing that Google became more successful signing up publishers when they changed their tactics.

Steve Sieck of EPS wrote: “But by restricting access to online viewing … denying the ability to save a copy to disk, and stressing publishers' voluntary participation and ability to set their own end user prices, Google is taking the "partnering” philosophy to heart in a way that was lacking in its peremptory approach to publishers at the launch of its Library Project last year.”

I’m glad to see that Google changed their approach. If they needed publishing content for this project to be successful, they needed to focus on how to make publishers feel better about participating. Now I’m not saying that the publisher’ concerns were valid, reasonable, or forward-thinking. However, for this project -

Publishers’ actions will significantly affect Google’s results!

Otaku

I recently read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow. Generally speaking, cows are brown or black and they basically all look alike. What if during your drive through the countryside you saw a purple cow?

Now, that would be remarkable!

Purple Cow is about actually BEING remarkable – not just having a great marketing plan or advertisements that tell people your offering is remarkable. It discusses how times are changing (have changed!) and how we need to change our approach to customers, product development, and marketing to be successful.

Some of my favorite ideas in this book are:

• Sneezers – In the age of viral marketing, sneezers spread the germs! They don’t just like your product in silence. They have to tell people about it. Embrace them. Create a remarkable offering, find your sneezers, excite them, and give them messages that are easy to share.

• Otaku – Why do sneezers HAVE to tell people about exciting offerings? Because they have an otaku for them. According to Seth, “Otaku describes something that’s more than a hobby but a little less than an obsession”. People with otaku are your passionate early adopters.

• Interpretation of Geoff Moore’s idea diffusion curve: You all would know this if you saw it. It’s the curve that starts with innovators on the left and progresses through early adopters, early majority, late majority, and finally, laggards. Historically, marketers (and product developers) shoot for the big area under the center of the bell curve (the early and late majority). They create mass advertising campaigns aimed at mass markets. If instead you target sneezers (innovators and early adopters) – they’ll bring along the rest of the curve!

This is a very quick read and I highly recommend it to everyone. It’s also a great book to get for your whole team and discuss (no I’m not on Seth’s payroll – I just have an otaku for this kind of stuff!).

Purple Cow is a purple cow! (Ah-choo!)

The Power of Inertia

Did you ever need to get something done (even something relatively small and simple) and have to go through an organizational gauntlet to get it started? Next time, don't wait for permission – just do it. Spend the money or start the project or whatever it is you need to do.

Why? Because if you start something, stopping it will require an action on someone else’s part – and odds are no one will act!

To act someone must take a stand or publicly voice a position - and people generally don’t like to do that.

Instead of being frustrated by the inertia in your organization, find a way to get it to work for you.

The New Cottage Industry: Part Deux

What do companies gain by supporting independent knowledge workers?

Financially speaking, a company gets to hire a specific expertise with no increase in headcount, salary, benefits, or other salary related expenses (e.g. unemployment insurance, social security contribution, etc.). In companies that are pressured to reduce or maintain headcount this could be a great way to manage peaks and valleys in the workload or to infuse a company with the knowledge of an expert for a limited investment.

That brings us to benefit number two – flexibility. There are some talents that you need for a limited period of time to work with your team. They may be used to help build a new competency in your organization or to offer a different perspective on a strategy, issue, or opportunity. Whatever your reason, you don’t need to make any long-term commitments.

Small companies may use an independent to fill a basic business need for which they don’t have enough work to hire someone full time. Attorneys and accountants have been providing their expertise in this way for decades. In fact, I have a CFO. His name is Gene and I love him. I see Gene about once a quarter and I call him when I have questions – works for me (and I’m pretty sure it works for Gene too)!

Personally, I think the best reason to hire independent knowledge workers is to cross-pollinate ideas. Companies can get themselves into a habit of repeating (or only recognizing) familiar patterns. They often run strategic projects and initiatives utilizing “the usual suspects”. These people are likely bright and motivated, but they are also often entrenched in a specific product or service view. They can be spread so thin that they don’t have the time to stay in touch with other industries that might have similar challenges or opportunities to their own.

Someone from the outside can offer a different perspective, connect you with a larger network of independents, and can help you customize your workforce to achieve a specific goal.

Why and where do you think companies can use independents? Where can’t they be used? Are there other benefits that aren’t listed here? What are the biggest drawbacks?

The New Cottage Industry: Knowledge Work

Last July I decided that I wanted to change the relationship I had with my employer. I was starting to find my role limiting. I wanted more diverse work and more control over what I did. My CEO agreed and I became a contractor.

Interestingly, we both gained financially. He reduced headcount, salary, and expenses (e.g. social security, unemployment insurance, benefits) and I managed to roughly preserve my salary working only part time. Sure I had to pay more social security, my own health insurance, computer equipment, supplies and every other business expense. However, with a fair hourly rate and access to the tax incentives associated with owning a business, I was only marginally behind my full time salary.

Am I an outlier? I don’t think so. Maybe “like finds like”, but all of a sudden I realize that many of my associates have done the same thing I did (or in some cases are planning to do it).

We’re becoming a cottage industry of knowledge workers!

Technology has enabled us to communicate effectively, find the information we need, travel when and where we need to, and execute initiatives virtually - as participants can now span the globe. Email, IM, and the Internet have actually made it easier and less time consuming to keep in touch with our networks and keep up-to-date on industry news. There are also continually more avenues through which we can secure health, life, and disability insurance.

One might say that I am no longer part of an organization. I would disagree. I am part of a self-selecting and self-correcting organization. This organization is built on a network of talented people that value collaboration and have a genuine desire to contribute. They are often the “cream of the crop”.

Is there a tax-id or legal entity at the top of the pyramid? No.

Why does there need to be?

I am connected through personal knowledge and reputation with hundreds (and, in my indirect network, likely thousands) of individuals. What’s more, for the closest “nodes” in my network I know these people very well. I know exactly how they can contribute to a project or business – and they know me.

I have a higher likelihood of assembling a team that is completely customized to the needs of a client than most large consulting firms. Why? I don’t “own” any of these people. I have the freedom to get the best person for the job without the constraint of worrying about idle employees on the bench. What’s more – these people have the ability to use me as part of their network as well.

Sure there are risks: Will I be able to consistently find work? Will I be able to do the work I want to do? What if I get sick? These are all things to consider - but I urge you to consider them for yourself. What are your priorities and what are your options? Too often we stay in the situation in which we’ve found ourselves just because we’re already there!

The bottom line: You’re opportunities are as strong and vibrant as your network. You don’t need to know everything yourself. You just need to know who knows.

Location, location, location!

For the last week I’ve been in Puerto Rico visiting a friend. Guess what the most interesting part of my trip has been. Do you think it was the beach, or the forts, or Old San Juan? Nope. It wasn’t any of those.

The most interesting part of my trip has been that I’m perfectly able to work. I have everything I need. Now some of you might think that’s horrible. The last thing you want to do on vacation is work and you wish that no one would bother you when you’re away.

That’s one way to look at it (and if you’re on vacation it’s a perfectly legitimate way to look at it). But what if you weren’t on vacation? What if, aside from any vacations you decided to take, you sometimes wanted to work in an interesting location so that when you weren’t working you could enjoy different scenery or the company of a far away friend?

We live in an amazing time. This is a time when we can architect our lives any way we want. It’s all about our priorities. Yes, we all have commitments and we all make our choices based on them. However, we have the opportunity to add flexibility and customization to our lives if that is something we value.

The point is that in the information industry I often get into debates about customization. How should we customize our content? How can we customize our user’s experience? There aren’t many who would argue with the statement that customization – even mass customization – is where we need to go.

Well what about people’s lives and their careers? Why can’t we customize where we work? Or how we choose to be associated with a company? (There will be more on that in my next entry)

Are your customers doing this? If so, where are they and how can you best meet their needs?

I hope you appreciate this food for thought. I need to do some work so that I can head to the beach in the morning. Good night!

A different way to run a business

This week I saw a posting on the Fast Company site about Craigslist. The post talked about how a segment on Nightline posited that the site is hurting the newspaper business. Craig Newmark, the site’s founder, said that “his site was serving customers in a way that newspaper classifieds can’t”.

For those of you not familiar with Craigslist, it’s an online listing of classified ads where users manage their own content. They have more traffic on their job boards than Monster and Career Builder combined. According to the Fast Company posting, Craiglist can also boast 3 billion page views per month. They have been in the black since 1998.

Jim Buckmaster, the CEO, was interviewed by David Kirkpatrick of Fortune Magazine at the SIIA conference I wrote about in my last posting. David estimated annual revenue for Craiglist to be about $20M. He also said that, according to a recent article in Fortune, Craigslist could be monetized to the tune of over $500M. He asked Jim why he was leaving this money on the table. Jim said that he and Craig are “not in pursuit of insane wealth” and “have enough revenue as it is”. He went on to say that they value their users and just want to keep listening to them and providing them with a valuable service.

David asked him if print papers should be worried about Craigslist and what advice might he have for print publishers. All Jim would say was that there was room for everybody, 90% of classifieds are still in print, and that he would hesitate to tell newspapers what they should do.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with Jim’s position on the accumulation of wealth, it’s hard to disagree with his focus on the customer. That focus is so sharp that Jim said they don’t even worry about competitive threats. Consider that for a minute. He invests no corporate resources in competitive analysis. He seems to regard it as unnecessary overhead. Instead he invests in providing his listings to more customers and using their feedback to enhance the site.

Craigslist is approaching classifieds with little or no overhead, with a focus on the customer, with users managing their own content, and with tools that are good enough. On top of that their business model requires little or no payment. In fact, recently some of their users ASKED to be charged (for real estate listings) so that they could re-list automatically and get some other features built into the site.

It is very clear what value Craigslist adds to classifieds. Instead of taking aim at Craigslist, traditional media should be determining what value they add. Who are their target customers and what could they be doing to serve them better?

Craigslist focuses on their customers’ well-being and Jim “can’t think of a better strategy” to pursue than doing just that. Maybe that’s the lesson here.

Someone who looks like they get it!

I recently went to the annual Software Information Industry Association (SIIA) conference for their Content Division. There were several interesting speakers, but a few of them really stood out. Dick Harrington (CEO, The Thomson Corporation) was one of those speakers. In keeping with my theme, I thought I’d share some of what he had to say about effectively changing the strategy and direction of a large established company. I have notes on his full session so please email me if you’d like them. What follows deals only with the direct actions he took to manage to change!

When Mr. Harrington took over as CEO in 1997, his focus was on getting Thomson ready for the future. He sold off the travel and newspaper businesses for $2.7B and $3.5B, respectively (thereby cutting his company in half). He didn’t see these business models as sustainable. He then began to rebuild Thomson with a series of acquisitions. His goal was that the acquired companies would work together with some interoperability. He was aiming for size and scale in markets where he felt large investments would be needed to grow the business. In many cases, he was focused on knowledge workers and the integration of Thomson information into his customer’s workflow.

One of his biggest challenges in becoming customer focused was Thomson’s culture. In his view Thomson was not creating long term value. He immediately started confronting the people issues and communicating a strategy to get the company focused on the customer.

He followed his strategy definition with action. In order to prove his commitment to the customer, he instituted the front-end customer strategy review as a way to align the organization. He had every business review their market, challenges, and priorities (he still does this annually). Each business needed to articulate how the organizational structure and resource assignments would need to change for them to achieve their goals. He also continues to spend 20 days a year personally reviewing the top 700 people in Thomson.

According to Thomson, decision support and high-end analytics are the value-added part of the information market. Mr. Harrington said that Thomson needs to worry about competitors that can “pick off” that high-end value, or even worse, change the game and reframe the market. He had some great insights in this area as well. He said that in order to reframe the market you must consider where the discontinuities are and how you can eliminate them. You must learn from your customer and understand how they work.

In building Thomson solutions, he and his team approached their customers and said “when do you use our content?” and “what are you doing 3 minutes before and 3 minutes after you use our products?”. Thomson kept building out their solution 6 minutes at a time! They hired the expertise to teach them how to consult with their clients and map their workflows. Then they transferred that knowledge to internal people.

It cost $200M to get Thomson focused on the customer and their workflow. Harrington shifted that money to the front-end (understanding the customer and their needs) from the back-end (where it had been used to incrementally improve existing products - adding bells and whistles that the market had never asked for!) in an effort to make Thomson more relevant to their customers.

A few of his underlying, and in my opinion, healthy philosophies:

1. No company can take their market and their standing within it for granted.
2. Thomson is positioned for the future but they’re certainly not done yet.
3. “We can’t own everything”. He was referring to some of Thomson’s content partnerships and one product they’re currently developing that’s 51% owned by Thomson and 49% owned by their customer(s). Wow – what a concept!

Manage to Change

What’s the point?

When people hear the phrase “Manage to Change” they often think of something they begrudgingly do because they have to! It’s reactive. It’s often delayed. There isn’t anything fun about it.

Me? I think of it more like surfing. Grab your board (no, I am not a surfer) and catch a wave!

Manage to Change is a positive imperative. On this page it means that we must continually adjust our strategy and objectives to the changing world around us (or we may very well wipe out!). It’s exciting. It’s full of possibilities. It’s something that we do proactively. We try to anticipate change. Maybe we can even create it ourselves!

In order to “Manage to Change” we need to:

• Be open-minded and inquisitive
• Look beyond the confines of our daily grind and our professional industry! What’s going on out there? What’s new and exciting? What could we use?
• Build in time to think, everyday – to consider the possibilities – to come up with off-the-wall ideas and see where they might take us! Do mental jumping jacks!
• Understand our strengths and weaknesses. Where do we need help?
• Only AFTER we consider the ludicrous is it time to filter our ideas. Which ones might delight our customers, make us more efficient, or create a new market?

I’m certainly not advocating frivolity (although there’s nothing wrong with that!). I simply believe that it’s too easy to box yourself in to what’s known or what’s comfortable and in doing so you miss out on a lot. Anticipate and capitalize on change.

Experiment (you can still be fiscally responsible!).

What good is it to define a strategy if you can’t manage to change?

An Introduction!

Why am I starting a blog? Well ......

Over the past 20+ years I’ve worked in eight different industries and watched several companies struggle through change. I was with AT&T right after it divested the baby bells. I was with Prodigy (anyone remember that?) when it was trying to create a commercially viable mechanism for delivering a consumer oriented online news and shopping experience (before AOL even existed). Then, about 6 years ago, I landed in a medical publishing company.

If there has ever been an industry smack in the middle of radical change (change over which they have little or no control) - it's publishing. If you're in the information business the world is a scary place right now.

Or is it? Is it scary or is it exciting? I suppose that depends on your perspective. To me - there isn't a more exciting industry on the face of the earth (OK – I’m a strategy geek – I admit it!).

If you're tightly connected to the way things have been done for decades (or as is the case in many print publishers - centuries) it's hard to come to terms with how the world of information creation and distribution is being continually turned on its head by technologies that empower the consumer.

Companies have sprung up that don’t have your heritage and commitment to quality and they’re providing consumers with content. Private individuals are providing consumers with content! You worry that the content isn’t good enough (especially in the medical information or legal arenas) – but the consumers are voting for that content with their attention (and sometimes even their dollars).

There’s something that isn’t quite right here. Who are you? What business are you in? What are your assets? How can you provide them to the consumer in a way that allows you to stay in business? Are you obsolete? What can you do?

You can close your eyes and hope it all goes away or you can figure out how to participate – and maintain a thriving business. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I’d like to find out what others think, what they’re doing, and how it’s working for them.

I believe in collaboration.
I believe that when we work together we increase the opportunities for everyone.

OK – so maybe I’m an idealist. I can live with that.

The reality is that people need information. They need sources they can trust, and they need to interact with information in a way that answers their questions when they arise. Quality is no longer in the eyes of the editor or the information provider – it’s in the eyes of the consumer. How do you take control? There’s the rub - you can’t! That’s what changed. You’re no longer in charge, but you can participate.

If you want to make it – you’re going to have to adapt.