“Disruption was never disruptive to the customers.”
– Clayton Christensen
Maybe we’ve been looking at this all wrong. Tons of virtual ink has been spilled on how the technology is disrupting us. But Christensen has a great point; people aren’t generally sitting around saying “the way we buy and consume products is too disruptive.”
As for corporate efficiency? Maybe that’s not enough, either. Robert Prather, CEO of Gray Television says he has a sign on his desk that reads “Even the most efficient dinosaurs are still extinct.”
The Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference panel on “What Top Media Executives Must Do Next” looked at how managers from different media disciplines are tackling innovation. For Prather, it’s about setting up a different sales team that reports directly to the general manager. “We found out early on that general sales managers guided web sales people away from key advertisers,” said Prather at the Friday afternoon session.
There is always lots of hope that digital initiatives will be grounded in lots of data about the successes it will have. Christensen says that’s an impossibility: “There is no data about the future, only the past.” In practice, Christensen admits, “What we’re doing is teaching how to take action when a thing is already over.”
The panelists agreed that there needs to be strategic buy-in from the very top. “What hinders companies from evolving?” asked Peter Smyth, Chairman and CEO of Greater Media Inc. “We need to have the right people in the right places to move forward – and we need to ask whether we have the resources to move ahead.”
None of this happens without some amount of worrying. We’ve heard a lot about how some traditional media staffers simply won’t adapt. There are changes that need to happen to become more digitally savvy, both in content and sales. Kirk Davis, President and COO of Gatehouse Media, expressed concern for his existing staff: “It’s a tremendous responsibility to take a legacy business and move it forward. You don’t want to disenfranchise the 6,000 people (who already work for Gatehouse).”
Christensen, in his second appearance of the morning, wrapped things up:
“We have a tendency in our society that just has a search for that one single thing that will solve the problem. It’s more than setting up a separate unit and thinking “I’ll go to heaven.” Think of how are people using (your product). I think the reality to solve customer problems is much greater than it ever was in the past.”