Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

One of the side effects of spending so much time thinking about (a) the media and (b) business management is that I can’t even read the recap of a baseball game in peace. I come across something like this . . .

Tigers score most runs this season, hand Rangers sixth straight loss

DETROIT (AP) — The Detroit Tigers’ biggest inning in four years could mean a lot more to the foundering Texas Rangers. Manager Ron Washington’s job might be in jeopardy.

. . . and the rant just boils up inside me.

Please bear with me here, because this isn’t so much about baseball as it is about management decisions and how the media covers them.

There are several things wrong with those two opening sentences:

1. The Tigers didn’t need their biggest inning in four years to beat the Rangers. They were already beating them. Sure, the score would have been 7-6 instead of 19-6, but a loss is a loss — and the psychological weight is still heavy when it extends a losing streak. Sure, when a team puts up an 11-run inning, that ought to be in the story’s lead, but the way it’s used here is not apt.

2. Washington’s job might be in jeopardy? According to whom? The writer? “Anonymous sources close to the Rangers’ front office”? No sources besides Washington are cited. The manager, for his part, said the right things: “Any time a team is in a losing streak, the manager’s job is on the line . . . It falls on me when the team isn’t playing well. I’m the manager . . . that’s the way it goes.” But this is a still just a unsubstantiated notion on the beat writer’s part — and not a helpful one, since the lead conveys a hunch or rumor as though it’s an established fact.

3. From the perspective of how the Rangers club is managed, the real story is the mediocre-to-low quality of the pitchers that Washington has been given to work with. It’s bad enough that the Rangers were facing the Tigers, who have one of the most dangerous lineups in the Major Leagues. Fact is, though, that the Rangers have been getting shelled frequently throughout this season — because their pitching isn’t strong. And whose job is it to acquire good pitching for the team? (Hint: not Ron Washington’s.)

It’s that last point I want to harp on, because we see this all too often in the “real” business world, too: a middle manager is handcuffed in terms of resources, personnel, decision latitude, or whatever — and then blamed when things go wrong.

The real fault here lies with the Rangers front office for assembling a thin pitching staff. Knowledgeable analysts were saying before the season ever started that the Rangers weren’t very good. Now those predictions are coming true on the field.

Here’s the thing: part of the blame for the team’s poor showing could fall to Washington. But if it does, he should be fired because of his overall qualities as a manager — not because of what happens in one game . . . against a heavy-hitting opponent . . . on a day when Ranger pitchers melt down one after another.

And an AP beat writer should help readers to understand that, not confuse the issue.

Here endeth the rant . . . for now.

~

(Photo by Dave Hogg.)

Here’s a simple thought I’ve been mulling for a while as I’ve watched the unfolding horror of newspaper circulation declines:

People in the newspaper business have made the fundamental error of thinking that they’ve always been in the news paper business. In fact, they’ve always been in the news delivery business.

The confusion is understandable, since it’s only been in the past 15 years that there’s been any viable alternative for mass delivery of printed news. When the Web came along, newspaper people saw it as inferior — inherently, unalterably, permanently — to the newsprint they had always so dearly loved.

I can sympathize: when I edited my high school’s newspaper, it never got old seeing my byline there on the pulp pages. Once it was printed it was real, you know? The same thing happened when I was all grown up and wrote some pieces for the Austin Chronicle.

But as a news consumer? Naah, I was pretty much hooked on the Web from the beginning. Much as I love the idea of sitting at the breakfast table or in a cafe or in a park reading the newspaper, I’m pretty easy about how I get my news. How well I remember sitting in the computer lab at St. Andrews in 1995, tracking the fortunes of the Chicago Bulls online because none of the British newspapers reliably carried basketball news.

What about you? You must take in some of your news and commentary online, or you wouldn’t be here. What do you think newspaper companies could do to stem the tide that has been flowing so strongly against them?

(Photo by Hamed Saber.)

I’ve been thinking a lot — too much — about the best way to frame this idea, so much so that it’s delayed me a couple of weeks in expressing it. So instead of worrying about “best,” let’s just bull ahead with “adequate for starters,” eh?

One of themes that comes at you thick-and-fast at SXSW Interactive is that the social media “can’t be controlled.” At some level, this is absolutely true, but to say it in those words hamstrings us unnecessarily. Why? Because it’s too easy for companies to hear “can’t be controlled” and run away as fast as they can from social media. As of this moment, they might be able to do so without obvious penalties; as time goes on, this option will be less and less viable.

Better, then, to think of it like this: social media inevitably erodes the old command-and-control models of advertising, corporate marketing, public relations, et cetera. This is so because the social media enable far too many people to express themselves exactly as they wish — with R-rated language and everything — and to (potentially) do so with just as big a megaphone as any corporation.

What’s required on the part of companies is to let go of the fantasy of command: You will not “command” the airwaves. You will not “command” the conversations around your offerings in the marketplace. Also, you will not “command” your employees, who can access all sorts of scary hiring-market information via LinkedIn and Jobster and Monster and Craigslist and the rest.

The antidote for this loss of command: just get over it. Historical and technological forces are against you, and those corporations and executives who insist on retaining command are destined to failure.

But you can exert a modicum of control. You can shape a conversation. You can rebut erroneous information about your company or your product. You can harness transparency so that it works for you. You can grow into the language of the social media so that you fall naturally into the mode of persuasion-and-recruitment rather than command-and-control.

For many executives, this is going to mean an uncomfortable transition. A whole set of uncomfortable transitions, even, since they’ll have to learn new technologies (blogging, commenting, tweeting, whatever) at the same time that they’re getting their heads into new modes of thinking (persuasion, conversation, give-and-take, active listening).

But it doesn’t mean that every old rule goes out the window. During the second half of the 20th century, U.S.-based firms used Druckerian management principles to create more prosperity for more people than at any other time in human history. Despite what some of the utopians at SXSW would have you think, those rules have not been thrown out the window. They do still apply. But they continue to be modified, especially by the savvy younger members of the workforce, in the U.S. and elsewhere, who have no interest in perpetuating — and no need to perpetuate — the repressive parts of the old management equation.

There is a new math in play, but it’s not all new. If you can let go of the fantasy of command and adapt your views on control to fit the way the social media actually work, you can then get a lot of good business done on old-fashioned principles — truly timeless principles like “giving customers what they want at a good price.” Like “taking care of customers.” Like “innovating to meet customers’ needs.”

The world is your oyster. The social media are nothing to be afraid of. Go get ‘em.

(General Patton and colleagues borrowed from the Library of Congress.)

Jeff Jarvis got me thinking about this topic with his post this morning:

Don’t bet on them

It’s amazing that reporters love horse-race coverage since they’re so damned lousy at it. Hillary Clinton has the nomination locked up. Rudy Giuliani is the sure nominee. Mike Huckabee is surging for the long haul. John McCain’s campaign is dead. Mitt Romney’s the one to beat. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is dead. Everything’s over last night.

(In case you’re not familiar with Jeff’s work: if you care about what’s going on in the media, you should be reading him. You won’t always agree with him, regardless of where you’re coming from — but that’s a good thing.)

Here’s part of the comment I left on Jeff’s post:

Amen, Jeff. Another one that’s tired every time I read it: “Are we in a recession already? Is this a recession? How do you define ‘recession’? Let’s ask Warren Buffett if he thinks we’re in a recession!” Blah-blah-blah.

Okay, yeah, it’s somewhat interesting to note when an official, formal, word-from-on-high recession starts and ends BUT meanwhile (a) in the tough times that inspire these kinds of stories, there’s ALWAYS something better to be reporting in terms of what’s going on at the ground level in the marketplace (and not just the financial markets!) and (b) an official, formal recession is always — by definition — definable only in hindsight anyway. Oh, yeah, and declaring a formal recession is also fraught with political agendas.

LB’s follow-up to Jeff’s post hits the nail on the head:

1. Reporters are human.

2. Many humans are lazy.

3. Horse-race coverage is designed by and for lazy reporters.

4. There is never any apparent penalty for making wrong predictions […]

Since I first read this, I thought of one more prime example of this phenomenon, one I’ve discussed frequently with Hoover’s crackerjack semiconductor writer, Jeff Dorsch: I mean the inevitable period revisits to Moore’s Law and how it can’t possibly — possibly! — be sustained very much longer. (Cue the voice of Scotty from Star Trek: “I dinna think she can take much more, Cap’n!”)

Mind you, there are good Moore’s Law stories out there, like this one that ran recently in the New York Times:

Trying to Put New Zip Into Moore’s Law

Why is this story better than the run of the mill? Because it focuses on the real challenges faced by chip makers, and talks about what a big chip maker — IBM — is doing to keep Moore’s Law going.

But keeping the heart of innovation beating is becoming ever harder and more expensive. Making chips is an improbable blend of farming, photography and baking: think of your standard 300-millimeter silicon wafer as a field where mostly metallic substances are “grown” according to patterns put in place by photolithography, and then “baked” at extremely high temperatures. […]

The remarkable progression of Moore’s Law, meanwhile, involves continually shrinking almost everything to do with the chips. Today, the transistors in a high-end chip are no wider than the nucleus of a smallish cell — that’s far smaller than the smallest light wave.

Many Moore’s Law stories of the slow-news-week variety, by contrast, focus on how semiconductor engineers have very nearly squeezed every possible advantage out of Material X, Process Y, or Technique Z in their quest for ever-faster and -smaller microchips — and arrive at the conclusion that Moore’s Law simply can’t go on.

The problem with this is that many innovative, hyper-competitive, and well-capitalized chip companies have a staunch vested interest in continuing to improve speeds, scale, throughput, etc. in their chips. As a rule, when they come up against the physical limitation of a certain material or process . . . they look elsewhere, as the NYT story aptly points out (”Mr. Edelstein is leading a team of researchers from inside and outside I.B.M. in developing a new way to solve the problem . . .”).

Okay, that might be more than you wanted to know about Moore’s Law and how it gets mis-covered, but maybe the point is clear: we see a lot of useless stories that don’t reflect real reporting or real insight into the topics at hand. Worse, we see these stories on cue at certain predictable points.

What are your (least) favorite examples of “news” stories you can safely ignore?

[Racetrack photo by Brian Teutsch; photos of Gordon Moore and original Moore’s Law graph courtesy of Intel.]

It’s good news for me that I’m not in the business of predicting the future — because like most everybody else, I’m lousy at it. But it pleased me to see this post from ReadWriteWeb:

Is the iPhone the Ultimate eBook Reader?

“People don’t read anymore,” said Steve Jobs last month. Try telling that to users of his company’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices, many of whom seem to be using the device as an eBook reader. Our network blog last100 theorized that what Jobs’ really meant was, who needs the Amazon Kindle when you’ve got an iPhone that does a lot more? “Will a developer write an app to read books on the iPhone or Touch?” asked last100’s Daniel Langendorf. Actually, a few developers already have, and at least one is doing very well.

The posts seems to confirm the prediction I made back in August:

Is the iPhone the answer for e-books?

One of these days, Harper or some other publishing house is going to crack this nut. They’re going to figure out — or take a risk to try figuring out — just how many books they can move in electronic format. It’s much likelier to happen on a popular device like the iPhone than on an expensive, standalone e-book reader. The publisher who figures this out will have an audience of commuters, air-travelers, bored people in waiting rooms, and so on who already have the right piece of technology in their pockets, and who only need to be convinced to pay a reduced price for the layout and words of a book without the paper and cardboard trappings.

So, score one for Tim!

My next not-so-radical prediction: Apple will make a bigger version of its iPod Touch that will be even better suited for reading e-books — and many other kinds of browsing as well.

(If you’re interested in a little rant on social media and its portrayal by other media, read on. Otherwise, please stand by for other programming.)

The title of this post might not quite — quite — be fair to Tom Hodgkinson’s arrant Guardian profile of Facebook, but it’s not far off, either. His question-begging begins right from the off:

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Read more

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Item:

Ex-NYT editor Howell Raines joins Conde Nast

The 64-year-old Pulitzer Prize winning journalist will be a contributing editor and media columnist for Portfolio.

You remember Howell Raines: Pulitzer prize-winner, memoirist, etc. who became editor-in-chief of the New York Times and proceeded to alienate his news staff and grossly mishandle the Jayson Blair scandal.

Well, focus for a moment on the first part of that description — “Pulitzer prize-winner” — and you can hold out hope that Raines’s tenure at Conde Nast will be fruitful.

Meanwhile, if you want a sober account of the disasters of Raines’s NYT reign, you can do no better than to find a copy of Seth Mnookin’s Hard News. While you’re doing that, I’ll pop the popcorn.  I imagine the media’s claws will come out once Raines gets going with his column.

Two of my favorites in conversation: Hugh interviews Seth about Seth’s new book. A favorite bit:

9. With the advent of certain Web 2.0 media coming along in 2007- Facebook, etc, suddenly the “Blogging is Dead” meme keeps popping up all over the place. I think they’re kind of missing the point. You?

Who the hell knows what ‘blogging’ means? People say, “that’s not a blog because” it doesn’t have comments or because it has three authors or because it’s got video or who knows what… What’s a book? a blog? a speech? Who knows?

I think it’s entirely possible that the ego-driven, comment-driven water-cooler blog is being replaced by Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think, not for one second, that the inherently closed communities of social networks are a replacement for the idea-driven blog designed to be read by surfers, strangers and the masses.

I agree entirely with Seth. People want to be prescriptive or proscriptive about what blogs are “supposed” to be, as though blogs were primarily a social contract. No — blogs are primarily a technology, like the printing press. They are a means of distribution. And just like it would be silly to think that books are all going to operate the same way (novels, almanacs, cookbooks, coloring books, etc.), it’s silly to think that blogs must have comments or must operate this or that way.

The whole interview is worth reading if you care about what’s happening in the online-business world.

My colleague Russ Somers pointed me to an item from Michael Arrington, who discusses the extreme ease with which Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader can be used to read e-books in formats other than the proprietary one sold by Amazon.

Stealing Books For The Kindle Is Trivially Easy

So since the Kindle makes for such an easy open-format e-book receptacle, surely it’s helping move the book world toward a day when e-books will flow over the ‘Net as readily as song files do today. For context on what I’m talking about, see this post from 19 November:

A BitTorrent for e-books?

As Arrington points out in his post, e-books are already on BitTorrent. The only missing link for wide-scale e-book piracy, working from the model I proposed a couple of weeks ago, is this:

A workable system for translating large numbers of printed books into digital files. This could include all sorts of approaches:

• optical scans, with or without character-recognition, image smoothing, and so on;
• system hacks of publisher/compositor computer networks that would enable direct piracy of typesetting files;
• Project Gutenberg-style keyboarding ventures. It seems clear that a technologically-driven solution based on scanning would be infinitely preferable to relying upon individuals (haphazard volunteers, paid employees, whoever) to keyboard very much material.

Mind you, it seems clear that the Kindle still needs some Apple-style design TLC. (Watch this Robert Scoble video on same if you’re in the mood to hear a rant.) But, at a minimum, it’s compatible with the scenario I laid out earlier.

If it needs saying, I don’t endorse violation of anyone’s copyright. I’m a writer myself, after all, and I’d rather make a living from what I write than not make a living from it. But if, say, you wanted to download a free novel from Project Gutenberg or Cory Doctorow or Charles Stross or Baen Books or . . . you get the idea.

In the wake of my post the other day about reflexive bashing of Twitter, I was planning to write something about the cycles of hype and anti-hype in the blogosphere, the pendulum swings of which you could probably plot mathematically. But then I came across this piece of wisdom from Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research:

The cult of immediacy versus the unstoppable groundswell

I think bubble thinking is driven by the swirl of events in this frenzied cult of immediacy. It’s hard to think straight when your head is buzzing with the cocaine high of whatever happened ten minutes ago. Steve Rubel, quoting Brian Reich, called it out as “Shiny Object Syndrome.” Behind this bubble is a reality driving forward, an unstoppable groundswell. Stuff that builds with that trend will matter. The rest will be swept away. . . .

You may think corporations don’t get it, but they do, eventually — they just move more slowly and carefully. I’ve now spoken with dozens — they’re spending real money, moving forward with projects, making mistakes, learning, and mobilizing. They have lots of money and big brands. As the mass of regular people absorbs these social phenomenon, many of those companies will be there to meet them, and laugh if you want, but they are not all clueless — not any more.

In the end, the blogosphere has its fun with the news of the moment. Often they (er, we) have smart things to say. But in the long run . . . only the long run matters.