A couple of weeks ago some old friends and I headed out to the Meadowlands Izod Center to hear The Dead. Not exactly The Grateful Dead of old as Jerry Garcia can never be replaced but a reformed and worthy sequel. Rather than seek some pale American Idol simulcra of Jerry the remaining original members of the band were smart enough to reinvent themselves. So this year they are touring with excellent musicians including Branford Marsalis who do not try to ape Jerry but instead take the sound into new places.

The Dead were always a great concert band – their rollicking jazz-like improvisations and modulations turned each concert into a different experience. For these musicians the goal of a concert was never to reproduce the exact sound of their latest studio album; rather each show was a unique jam session which might very well feature some songs that had also been released but never in the same way. The ultimate “been there done that.”

Along the way on that proverbial long strange trip I believe that The Grateful Dead discovered the new economic model for the music industry 40 years ago. We are all familiar with the sad story of how music industry bosses sought to hold back the zero-cost reproduction capabilities of digital media by locking-up the music first in vinyl records then in cassettes and eight track tapes and finally in CDs. When young folks everywhere joined a mass revolt against copyright and just downloaded MP3s the music industry sued them and then ultimately capitulated into the waiting arms of Apple’s Steve Jobs.

What the Dead figured out a long time ago is that artists should give away recorded music and make their money from touring building brand and merchandising. Most of the band’s 5000+ live shows are available for download or at least stream on the internet (see www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead or www.deaddisc.com/GDFD_Dicks_Picks.htm). Rather than suing fans to prohibit bootleg recordings the Dead allowed its devotees to set up microphones at their concerts and also provided high quality tapes of every show right off the mixing board.

Thus the recordings themselves become viral advertisements for the group and build brand and demand for concert tickets and merchandise which are harder to copy. Now the downside of this model is that the band cannot just sit back and count royalties from the sale of its recorded music and deign to do a concert tour every other year to promote its latest album. Instead the musicians need to embrace touring and playing as their primary mission. The music company also becomes more of a brand management and promotion company with likely reduced economics. However this is not far from where the music industry seems headed itself with concepts like the “360 contract” which seeks a cut of non-recorded income.

As for me I was just there to enjoy the show and muse upon content monetization models. Oh and yes I bought Mariana and Walter some really cool tie-dyed tee shirts.

I often get asked why I decided to write a blog. The answer unfortunately is not that I felt I had anything so important to say that I needed to share it with my 10000 closest friends. Rather the reasons were quite selfish – I wanted to learn.

I write a blog for the same reason I experiment with social media like Facebook Twitter Yammer Linked-in Dopplr etc. I do it to learn-by-doing — what the academics usually call "experiential learning."

For me learning is a lifelong passion and commitment. One of the best things about my job and the business of Thomson Reuters is that I am genuinely interested in and curious about our customers their businesses the technology we and they use the world our journalists document and so on. My learning curve remains steep and I feel that the day I dementedly decide that I have learned everything worth learning is the day I should find another thing to do. Take this as a personal rejection of the sentiment attributed to that early and infamous head of the US patent office who declared that everything worth inventing had already been invented.

Like everyone else I learn in a variety of ways. I learn by watching others; I learn by reading; I learn from teachers. However I also believe that one of the most effective ways to learn is simply by doing.

Imagine it is the early years of this century and the CEO of a major information provider with 2500 journalists was beginning to hear a lot about blogging and the phenomenon of citizen journalism. Now imagine that he wanted to really understand what was going on; what were the motivations of its early adopters; what were the implications for media companies or even just how do you do it what tools are needed and who would care?

One common approach taken from the standard-issue CEO toolkit would have been to request the Head of Strategy Business Development or Editorial to study the landscape and report back her conclusions replete with powerpoints and acronyms. Another more expensive approach would have been to hire a McKinsey Bain or other management consultancy to author a comprehensive report. A third closer-to-home approach would have been to create an account on one of the multiple services that offer blog hosting and just start doing it and see what happens.

I chose this last approach and what you are reading today is my third generation weblog. Along the way I have learned a lot from members of this community who interact with me and offer their comments; I have learned about what this small audience finds interesting or not; and I have learned things about myself and perhaps the motivations of other bloggers.

There is also a lot I have not learned by doing it myself. I haven’t gained a birds-eye view of what others are doing; I don’t have a clue about industry size or economics; and I haven’t discovered the ultimate answer of what hybrid media will emerge. However by experimenting myself I have thought more about these issues and read more third party blogs than I otherwise would have.

I would not rush to advocate the teaching of neurosurgery by neophyte experimentation (better to await a later stage residency). However there is much to recommend learning-by-doing — especially the confidence that comes from knowing you can do something yourself rather than just trying to remember what some brilliant consultant said it was all about. To quote the departed (not so dearly by many) Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld we can cut down on the things "we do not know we do not know."

I hope this helps to explain why I began to blog; why I continue is a story for another day.

I spoke recently at an interesting monthly gathering of smart switched-on tech and media leaders in Brooklyn organized by the very talented Sam Lessin – also known among friends of his accomplished father Bob as “Lessin 2.0.” The salon is called Y+30 and challenges its presenters to discuss a different industry each month focusing on what it might be like 30 years into the future. Although daunting at first this challenge is strangely liberating for those of us whose normal strategic horizon is the quite tactical and incremental three to five years.

For my talk I chose the future of financial information and focused on how one day public company disclosure might overcome its current limits of time and space. In particular I posited a world awash in financial and operating data in which company executives no longer pretended to control the timing and nature of information about their enterprises which is disclosed to the public through then outdated constructs such as 10-Ks 10-Qs and press releases. Instead there would be a constant flow of data directly distributed from every firm’s ERP systems. Similarly such antiquated geographical concepts as onshore vs. offshore markets domestic regulation and “flowback” would be rendered meaningless by seamless global trading and regulation.

Granted these ideas are a bit far-fetched but that is precisely the ground rules of Y+30. Given the calls for greater international regulatory coordination in response to the current economic crisis and the prevalence already today of expert networks like Gerson Lehman and primary research such as pinging ecommerce sites for sales data perhaps my vision is in fact not sufficiently long-sighted.

In the event my talk itself and the ensuing discussion was not particularly controversial (at least in this crowd) but my answer to a somewhat unrelated question on the future of newspapers has been ricocheting in an increasingly inaccurate way across the blogosphere. I did in fact imagine a future (again 30 years hence) when a newspaper (in my example my hometown New York Times) could employ only 60 journalists rather than the hundreds who work there today. In my example I challenged our conception of what a newspaper must include and imagined my theoretically ideal paper which combined New York Times content on the Middle-East the FT on Europe the Wall Street Journal or Reuters for finance ESPN for sports and so on. The web of course already makes such a mash-up possible today either through browser tabs or RSS feeds.

In this sort of disaggregated world the NYT would not need a staff of hundreds to produce a fully integrated newspaper any more than Apple needs to manufacture its own hard drives or touch screens. I imagined that to really focus on one or two core strengths that it could do better than any other publication the Times might need 30 star journalists – the Tom Friedmans and William Safires a couple of great editors and then an up and coming group (or farm system) of 30 junior staff who could grow into the next generation of stars. I readily admit this would be much different from our current view of what a newspaper should look like but ironically this alternative reality is not so far removed from that apparently described by the great Times editor Max Frankel in a memo to management several years ago (see The Inheritance Vanity Fair May 2009).

Even if this vision of a more open and interoperable newspaper were financially viable it will be difficult for the current generation of integrated papers to get there. I know from painful personal experience at Reuters that it is much easier to build new from zero to 60 staff than to reduce 1000 to 60. Moreover there is no reason to believe (just because I came up with a low number to be intentionally provocative) that the “right” number is not 200 or 300. The principle however is the same. When I fly on American Airlines I am actually pleased they feature Starbucks coffee rather than American Airlines coffee. I don’t want Starbucks baristas flying or maintaining the 777 but I see no reason other than inertia why every function must be staffed by “insiders.”

The modern digital world is increasingly frictionless. This requires every company that wishes to survive and prosper to really understand and focus on its core competence. To repeatedly ask “what do we do better than anyone else? What defines us?” At Thomson Reuters some of our businesses used to build their own computer hardware and operate communications networks but these are not our core skill set. Today we still build our own editing systems but likely not for ever. Newspapers are glorious fabled institutions which serve an important civic role but that does not give them a perpetual bye to avoid change and reinvention like the rest of us.

Having just watched the tender movie Marley and Me about the irrepressible blond Labrador I realized that our dog Luna is the only one of our “children” who has not figured prominently in this blog. Luna does not get taken to the museum or on ski trips; she does not have a weekly soccer practice (although she sometimes cheers on Walter from the sidelines) but for a little while longer she remains the largest of our three kids.

At around 80 pounds Luna is not even large for an English Bullmastiff; however what she gives up in weight she more than makes up for in determination and affection. I am perhaps the only member of the family with the strength to restrain her even on leash if she detects a moldy but choice piece of bread lying close by in the gutter. Luna is an eating machine.

Her puppy years passed easily enough with only the occasional TV remote control or pair of high fashion sunglasses as teething aid. But full grown her hunger knows no bounds. The cost of just keeping the “Brown Beast” as my mother rather reverently calls her in dog chow rivals New York City private school tuition. Add to this the occasional trip to the “Vet to the Stars” and the seeds of financial ruin are sown. The other members of the family may keep themselves healthy on the regular Thomson Reuters health plan but Luna gets the very best veterinary medicine can provide.

Most of the time Luna just lies around the house and in this she is hardly distinguishable from her human siblings. When we got our first Bullmastiff friends said we were nuts to try to keep such a large dog in a small New York City apartment. Well since then the apartment has gotten a little larger but the more important point is that even such a large dog as Luna actually takes up reasonably little space compared to the typical Park Avenue lap dog. These small yapping terrors fly about an apartment at warp speed leaping from couch to table top to kitchen counter. As such they remind me of fast moving electrons darting along their orbital shells. Per my canine adaptation of the well-accepted uncertainty principle of quantum physics you can never quite determine the precise location of these electron-sized dogs at any given time – although their ceaseless barking does provide an approximate clue. Luna on the other hand poses no such quantum mechanical challenge. Whereever she chooses to sit (and I would not argue the point) she takes up a fair amount of space but that’s it – she wont move again until feeding time.

Luna is also a quiet dog. She can happily sleep through the worst thunderstorm or display of Grucci fireworks but on the rare occasion she does bark or growl we all pay attention. She is a good guard dog and can appear quite menacing at full gallop but this potential ferociousness is undermined by her habit of always carrying a soft plush toy in her mouth to eagerly greet the Son of Sam or whichever intruder is nigh. I did think once of buying her a soft toy shaped like a gun but I thought better of it.

Certainly among the nicest qualities of dogs is that they are always happy to see you; don’t care whether you are rich or poor or whether you have had a good day or bad day at work or school. All they ask for is a little love and affection ….and of course about 100 pounds of dog food per month.

With Bernie Madoff locked-up in the Manhattan Correctional Center better known to New Yorkers as ‘the Tombs” (a fitting place for him to enter prison life never to return) I thought I would share one of the odder thoughts (or mental hyperlinks) I have had.

Although the victims of this enormous fraud deserve our help and sympathy at its core what made Bernie’s scam so powerful was the seductive offer it extended to investors to let them into the inner circle a private club or sanctum sanctorum to which few are ever admitted. This reminds me in an odd way of the allure of the luxury goods market: “Madam we could not possibly sell you a fabled Birkin bag; the waiting list is years long.” Followed some weeks or months later by the helpful call of a sympathetic store manager who reports that one such extremely expensive handbag happens to have surfaced at a sister store which might be available if the shopper could act fast.

Now before I receive petabytes of hate mail let me say that the criminal acts of an evil man can and should in no way be equated with the perfectly legal marketing tactics of the high-end luxury market. However one of the most seductive elements of the Madoff crimes was the irony that at the same time that Bernie was brushing off would-be investors with a “it’s probably not for you” he was apparently paying outsize selling commissions to feeder funds to take in ever larger new flows of cash.

I suppose we should not be surprised at this warped parallel. Madoff would not have been so successful over a very long period had he not understood how to tap into one of the deeper insecurities of the human character. Namely the strong desire most of us harbor to be included to feel on the inside of a very good thing to get the present denied to others.

Perhaps Groucho had it right again: Don’t try too hard to be a member of any club that would have you.