What kills old-line businesses? Their own competence, writes Clayton M. Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma. In fields as diverse as hard drives, mechanical diggers and discount stores, he finds evidence that when industries are challenged by upstarts, the “smart” thing is often the worst thing to do.
He who saves his life shall lose it.
The aging industries that survive are the ones who truly innovate. Who risk giving free rein to renegade thinkers in their midst. And let those rebels discover the new rules that lie beyond the horizon.
Gotta one-up the upstarts.
Kresge and Woolworth knew rapid-turnover discount-department stores could challenge the Macy’s of the world. So Kresge created a Kmart group with true independence, while Woolworth’s let the existing execs handle Woolco. You know which one lived.
Today, newspapers face doom from an even more disruptive source: the Internet. And they’re feeding this beast with their best blood in hopes it’ll grow into some thriving, healthy new business body.
At first blush, this thinking seems sound. If you can’t lick ’em, don’t just join ’em, lead the charge.
But not so fast.
First big problem: If the old guard is in charge, it’ll limit the new business to established, “proven” ideas, habits and prejudices. Meaning: Everything will serve the master News. The blogs will be newsy. The podcasts too. What’s next? Let’s add video. And cellular alerts. Go the whole multimedia route and call it innovation. But it’ll still be news … and opinion about the news. And almost exactly what TV and radio websites are already doing. Meanwhile, what grows exponentially? All sorts of other things. Search engines. eBay. Wikipedia. YouTube. MySpace. Netflix. Ever see a newspaper invent anything like those?
Second big problem: Feeding the Web drains a newspaper’s blood. Give away this afternoon’s breaking news for free, and two days of papers are immediately devalued: today’s and tomorrow’s, both rendered out of date. The more news is undermined, the more newspapers will have to perform two conflicting missions: Become more timely for the Web, and more timeless for print. The immediacy of multimedia won’t solve this. Multimedia will widen the chasm, while adding expense.
The solution? Learn to reverse the flow. Learn from the Web. Use it gather new material that gives paper new content, new life.
Create a revolutionary group not just to evolve the Web, but start a revolution that might save newspapers, too.