Is Your Business Becoming A Newspaper?

Sunday,November 1, 2009 started just like every other morning of the week. I woke up and turned on Fox and Friends to get the latest fair and balanced news. The first headline I heard from Alisyn Camerota (the weekend anchor) was that Abdullah Abdullah had dropped out of the presidential race in Afganistan. An hour or so later I sat down to read the Sunday paper and the first headline I notice said, "Challenger poised to quit race", another story about the Afghan presidential race.

I'm really not following Afghan politics that closely but I couldn't help notice the difference in the two headlines and how much they resemble the state of some businesses.

For a moment forget all you know about the biased press being on the ropes and focus on the difference in the Fox and Friends headline and the newspaper's headline. Even with all the advance since the invention of movable type the paper had to go to press long before Fox had to go on the air and that time delta was the difference between reporting what may happen and what had actually happened.

The paper's overall business strategy may be sound but it has been overtaken by market forces that they failed to recognize, analyze and heed (sorry but I just couldn't make that last word rhyme). Did newspapers fail to understand the impact that electronic media would have on their overall strategy; assuming that is,their strategy included providing accurate and timely news. Had they not been rigidly myopic could they have switched to a different format that would have allowed then to continue to thrive alongside twenty-four hour cable news?

I can't accurately comment on the eventual downfall of newspapers except to wonder if their commitment to succeed in a shifting marketplace will lead to their failure, in need of a bail-out as it were. It happened to Sony twice. Once with the Batamax and the second time with the Discman. Both times Sony had a sound strategy and both times the products performed badly. Both times a shift in market demand or technological advancement did them in.

So what does an organization do? Should they change strategy to account for every change in their market regardless of how small? What if the change in the market turned out to be a rapidly passing fad, an annomoly? The Harvard Business Review once quoted a Boeing executive as saying that (because of lead-times and retooling etc)you bet your company with the decision to produce the next generation of aircraft. When you set your strategy how do you keep from betting your company?

There needs to be one person or one consultant inside of every company to act as a devils advocate or disruptive force. It would be their job to identify all the potential seen and unforeseen forces that could lead to a serious puncture wound to your plans, study them to the point that the list could be prioritized based on probability and other common risk variables, a build contingencies based on their occurrence. In this way you wouldn't be caught by surprise and you would know where to go to get additional expertise to make a rapid, yet well thought out, change. This person wouldn't necessarily be the best loved guest at the company picnic but they could very well save you a bundle of money.

Don't get caught setting type when the cable company goes flying by.