Tiger Woods and Intangibles

Yesterday in the New York Times, Frank Rich called for making Tiger Woods, Person of the Year. Rich said

What’s striking instead is the Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led. What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media – all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids – fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it.

Enron and Tiger Woods. He got me there. I couldn’t resist despite all that has been written about Tiger, as we all had come to call him.

You see, in both cases, we saw success in one sphere and assumed success in all others. Read more

Could Twitter Save the New York Times?

Here’s a new perspective on the newspaper question that I have been examining a lot lately. Umair Haque suggests How to Save Newspapers (Or, Why the NYT Should Acquire Twitter). He says that it is time for some different thinking. Twitter is a new delivery mechanism. And newspapers definitely need new delivery networks.

Remember that it was recently disclosed that the Boston Globe had an opportunity to invest in Monster.com fourteen years ago. It would have disrupted their cash cow: classified ads. In hindsight, we realize that they made a big mistake.

He is on to something.

Fighting Flu From the Bottom Up

Our new book has a chapter on how management has shifted from command and control to a model of “orchestration,” which is a term first used by Peter Drucker. The basic idea is that knowledge and communication have been turbocharged by technology. This means that the answers to most questions no longer reside at the top of an organization, as they did in the industrial economy. They are distributed among everyone in the organization. Better actions come when you set free the power of the knowledge and ideas at the bottom of the organization. That turns many traditional management approaches on their head.

The understanding of this is growing throughout our society. That’s why I was really glad to read David Brooks’ take on the global reaction to the swine flu crisis in the New York Times this week. Read more

Enormous Opportunities in the Construction Business

There is a really good video story from the New York Times called The Greening of the American Hard Hat.

The creation of jobs is a critical issue for the U.S., not just because of the recession but because we outsourced and downsized so many of our industries in recent decades. Green building is an enormous opportunity to create jobs. And it’s not just about construction, it’s about “how we design, build and sustain a building.”

According to this report, 40% of our carbon dioxide emissions and 70% of our electricity are consumed by buildings. We need to rethink existing as well as new buildings. This will require leveraging and innovating based on our strong national intellectual capital.

Alternate Newspaper Business Models

I have been collecting a list of alternative business models that are emerging to deploy the journalistic competencies of newspaper intellectual capital–without the bricks and mortar expense of printing an physical version of the paper.

Here’s a story in the New York Times on ‘hyperlocal’ sites that focus on local issues without using professional journalists. These business models are still in process but the belief is that the focus on a specific audience will make them more attractive to advertisers.

The Intangibles blog had a post featuring a site called Tyee that plans to take donations for the British Columbia election campaign–with the idea that donors will help guide the focus of the reporting.

On the News Hour the other night (the story is on their website now), MinnPost.com was featured. It is creating a non-profit model based on ads, sponsorships and memberships (not unlike NPR and PBS).

The other guest was a for-profit entrepreneur from Patch.com that is described as “a for-profit company that aims to present online news and information to towns of up to 50,000.” The CEO, Jon Brod, explained the opportunity:

I think there are two things going on. First is that this is an incredibly low-cost model. When you take out the ink, the distribution, the circulation, the print costs, and the significant overhead, and you compare, you know, Patch.com to a like-sized daily newspaper, you’re looking at roughly 4.5 percent to 4.7 percent of the cost.

And the second thing is that as eyeballs and advertising dollars migrate from offline to online, we are very confident that we can secure significant revenues to create a very profitable business over time.

If his figures are right, there is room in the business model. What if the money that I pay to subscribe to the Globe all went to an on-line model. I don’t pay for on-line access now but if the physical paper went away, I would have to get my local news somewhere. And I would not want to rely completely on “citizen journalists.” I have a degree of faith in the work that journalists do to synthesize issues.

Last night  Jim Lehrer was on on Emily Rooney’s show, Greater Boston. When discussing the newspaper dilemma, he quoted Thomas Jefferson as saying that a democracy needs an informed electorate.

We need to take the newspapers’ troubles seriously. But we cannot subsidize the old model. New models can be more efficient and maybe even more effective. Lots more to discuss over time. Please share if you see new models emerging.

The Boston Globe Caught by Disruptive Innovation

The announcement a couple weeks ago by the New York Times that they were considering closing down the Boston Globe was just another chapter in the story of the troubled newspaper industry. I’ve written about this and related troubles in content-creation businesses a lot lately but here are a few new angles.

Disruptive innovation is hardest on the incumbent. There was a story in the Globe this weekend explaining that, in 1995, the founder of Monster.com, the huge job search site approached the Globe. He offered an equity share for $1 million. At the time, the Globe’s job classifieds generated $100 million per year. The Globe didn’t even have a website then and they couldn’t see why they should compete with themselves. Fast forward to 2009. Monster’s revenues exceeded $1.3 billion last year and the Globe is losing $50 million. Read more

Shift to a New Model of Capitalism

I don’t usually post on my blogs on Sundays. Not out of any religious sense. Just out of a sense that I don’t want to add to anyone’s reading list on what I hope to be a day of rest.

But today is different. I have been reading more and more people saying that this is a new moment. Wanted to weave the threads together. Read more

Pittsburgh’s Lessons for Detroit

The New York Times has an interesting follow up to a post from my blog at the IC Knowledge Center here about how Pittsburgh has leveraged its intangible economy to build a stronger, more sustainable future following the collapse of the steel industry Read more