I see many parallels between what is happening in our industry and Clay Shirky's take on the past, present, and future of journalism. More importantly, I see that we are now where newspapers were 15 years ago. We can learn from their mistake and change our outcome.We are aware that there is some general threat which requires us to change and we're drawing up a bunch of schemes and plans, all of which assume we'll still continue doing basically the same thing in a slightly different way ... but we refuse to consider that the unthinkable scenario is real.
"[Employees] who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse." I see it happening to people all around me. It's happening to me.
What we need more than anything is to allow experimentation. Stop trying to fit new ideas into old moulds. Stop diluting your best talent by forcing them to work with the old guard inside the existing org structures. Stop assuming that the future includes the factory you are operating today.
Web technology is cheap, and the few good people you already have can get a lot more done if you just get the hordes bureaucrats out of their way.
We don't need the people at the top to come down from the mountain and do it for us; they just need to let it happen.
2 comments:
The industry definitely needs to figure out how online works, but is the analogy exact? I'm not sure.
Clay's argument is that the internet has made newspapers obsolete, leaving journalism as the fundamental need to be met in new ways.
I agree with you about the unimaginative way the research industry has approached working online...but has the internet made research agencies obsolete? I'm not sure.
The common thread, I suppose, is a contempt for real people and their time. In the case of newspapers it's their readership, in our case it's respondents.
@leadershipfactor
There are differences in the details, but the big picture is the same.
Both business models are threatened by the Net (albeit in different ways); both underestimated or outright denied the size of the problem; both assumed they could just give themselves a "digital facelift" and continue business-as-usual; both were wrong.
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