Category: Blog

Work-Life Balance

Posted on by tomglocer
I was not long in the workforce before I started hearing a lot about a certain mythic state of equipoise called the "work-life balance." The core message seemed to be that "work" was something odious to be minimized because the only worthwhile "living" occurred out of work hours. Indeed the data certainly support the claim that workers are putting in more hours than at any time since abolition (1865 in the US); however I am not convinced that this always translates into an unbalanced or incomplete life.
Since the time I started working full-time in 1984 I have not shied away from hard work. However none of my wife kids or I believe that I have sacrificed family or personal happiness at the alter of Mammon. Rather than a very sharp black and white separation between work and life technology and more flexible work practices are beginning to blur the distinction between work and personal life. Taken to an extreme the constantly buzzing Blackberry can ruin the family dinner or story-telling time; however fax machines laptops Blackberries I-Phones and home broadband have made it possible in recent years to blend work and life — at least for many office workers.
Moreover to insist on a rigid work-life balance always suggests to me that work is some awful Anglo-Saxon torture visited upon the otherwise "free" soul of Rousseau’s natural man. I recognize of course that throughout my working life I have been fortunate to work in safe relatively high-paying white collar jobs that provide intellectual challenge but my point is that it is precisely in these environments that we hear most about "work-life balance." One need not be a Calvinist to believe that useful work can also contribute to a life well-lived.
There is little new in this. At college (university for those outside the US) my classmates divided quite evenly between those who left dorm room or apartment to go work at the library and those of us for whom reading Balzac did not seem to be hard labor to be performed only in a salt mine and who happily stayed at home balancing "work" and "life."
Lest this post appear like a paid advertisement by the Business Roundtable on the rewards of capitalism I remind you that no businessman has ever declared on his deathbed that his life would have been fulfilled had he only had time for one more conference call.

Video Games and the Allegory of the Cave

Posted on by tomglocer
I continue to learn interesting lessons observing my kids playing with technology and new media. My son Walter age 8 has suddenly woken up to the joy of sports for young boys. He plays soccer and tennis skis and swims well and in general seems quite athletic. This pleases his aging athlete dad no end.
Walter has also taken to watching live sports on TV with me (everything from NFL to X Games) which among other benefits means we now have the votes to turn off Sponge Bob in the family room. Walter is also addicted to playing soccer and American football games on his Nintendo.
What is really interesting about this to me is that when Walter "makes" a great play on the video game he often runs over and wants me to watch a replay. At first I sort of ignored this with my Digital Immigrant worldview that this was somehow not "real." However I came to realize that for Walter the simulated actions of Ronaldinho on his Game Boy were no less "real" than a television replay of a great goal actually scored by the "real" Ronaldinho. This epiphany for me must be obvious to every gaming industry developer.
It reminded me in my usual warped hyper-linked way of the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic — yes we really did read the classics at Columbia. In his Socratic investigation on the meaning of reality Plato tells the story of prisoners who were chained since birth in a cave and only permitted to see shadows of puppets projected onto the back of the cave wall. When one prisoner finally emerges from the cave he does not recognize the "real" figures in the flood of sunlight .
At Reuters I encouraged our participation in various online worlds including most famously Second Life. One of the reasons I thought such experimentation would benefit the company was that the generation of gamers today would expect far more participatory graphics environments when they came of age professionally. So for example I imagine that the current generation of teenagers reared on World of Warcraft the Sims and Second Life would find 2D financial graphics pretty lame. What I overlooked was the wonderful focus group growing up in my own house.
Many thanks Walter – let’s look at that Ronaldinho goal one more time.

Think Positively and Good Things Will Follow

Posted on by tomglocer
According to a recent book The Geography of Bliss by former New York Times reporter Eric Weiner the British rank among the least happy people on earth. Weiner writes: "In Britain the happy are few and suspect. For the British happiness is a transatlantic import. And by transatlantic they mean American. And by American they mean silly infantile drivel."
Now I will confess that I have sometimes felt a bit self-conscious in Britain about my general state of optimism. I once had a distinguished City banker advise me to stop smiling so much because investors and analysts would find it incongruous with the weak state then of Reuters. However I have also known some hugely positive optimistic subjects of the Queen. In Britain it seems to me that individuals can be quite positive but there is a social dynamic that compels them to veer to the negative when they form groups. In part this produces a delightful self-deprecating humor and an absence of the prideful boasting to which my American compatriots have been known to fall prey. However unchecked group negativism can undermine performance.
There is now a substantial body of scholarship which supports the seemingly obvious point that people are attracted to high-energy positive individuals and that a positive attitude can be demonstrated to improve performance. See Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance by Kim Cameron. In medicine the placebo effect is well documented. However the power of positive suggestion can perhaps be seen at its strongest in sports. Does the coach instruct his promising pole vaulter to envision herself failing to clear the bar as she runs down the approach? When the star athlete is in "the groove" does she imagine that she can never achieve her objective? Of course not. The same principle can be seen in business. So for example few great salesmen boost their confidence before a key client meeting by reminding themselves that the product they are selling sucks and that no one is likely to be interested in it.
In the British boardroom a great deal of activity seems to be focused on avoiding the negative. Required standards of corporate governance not only create a strong Chairman to oversee the Chief Executive but also a Senior Independent Director to oversee the Chairman. Why I often wonder is there not a need for a Super-SID to oversee the SID and so on? Similarly much executive compensation policy seems to focus on avoiding that cardinal sin a "payment for failure" rather than on providing a large upside to incentivize extraordinarily good performance. Could it be that business is seen as something inherently bad that needs to be constrained?
I will readily admit that US corporate governance has historically been too permissive of large exit payoffs for non-performing executives and clubby boards dominated by CEOs but this has been changing in recent years. However I think that fundamentally Americans believe that business is a good thing for society and that notwithstanding its Enrons Worldcoms and sub-prime crises it should be encouraged and not unduly restricted by rules seeking to prevent the odd abuse. Much of the debate on Sarbanes-Oxley turns on whether the US has now gone too far in seeking to constrain malfeasance.
So perhaps societies tailor their laws and attitudes to business to suit their national character. An optimistic "sky’s the limit" bravado for the Americans and a somewhat dour "avoid the worst" demeanor for the British. This might explain why the US is plagued by so many corporate scandals but also why it has the most successful venture capital industry. Each culture has much to learn from the other but it may turn out that the students are not "wired" to learn the lesson.

The Innovator’s Legal Dilemma

Posted on by tomglocer
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen explained why it is so difficult for large, successful companies to innovate and grow new businesses. Professor Christensen’s insightful analysis is no longer controversial.  We understand why a large computer company like IBM needed to separate and ring-fence its entry into the personal computer market, and conversely, why so few of the great mini-computer makers made it into the PC era. 
 
To this important piece of scholarship, I offer a minor corollary from the media world.  I am often asked why all the innovative services in media and entertainment originate in small companies rather than the established titans which have all the resources, including brand.  The principal answer to this question remains the classic Innovator’s Dilemma.  However, I think one additional factor is at work in the content industries:  good legal departments.
 
When you think of innovations in the music industry like the original Napster or KaZaA or the phenomenal rise of YouTube, one understands why it is not Universal Music or NBC which blazes the trail.  In the content world, it must be admitted that a fair number of start-ups adopt a legal position that could be best described as “we will worry about copyright infringement when we are successful”.  Indeed, that is precisely what is going on now as Google is regularizing YouTube’s content relationships.
 
Since I practiced law for many years I offer this defense of my former colleagues:  Don’t blame the lawyers for once.  If a product manager at NBC called upon the formidable GE legal department and presented a business plan that was based on ripping-off copyright until the service was so popular, fearful content owners would no longer complain, he would be laughed out of Fairfield. Big companies with stringent compliance policies and now Sarbanes Oxley controls to attest to are just not going to take these risks.  Nor should the junior product manager just not consult the lawyers for  fear that he will get the “wrong answer”.
 
We must recognize that there are often legitimate structural reasons why most challenges to the established order come from outside the firm.  This is also not a bad thing as it quite naturally serves as a check on the dominance of large organizations — perhaps far more effectively than antitrust policy.

SIIA Speech — Should Consumer Media Companies be Publicly Owned?

Posted on by tomglocer

I gave the follwing speech this week at the Software Information Industry Association. I chose to be intentionally provocative setting out an argument that traditional consumer media companies (newspapers broadcast TV etc) should not be publicly owned because the public equity markets do not have the patience to support a company through the transition to new digital revenues.

I am glad that it has stoked a good debate both at the SIIA and beyond. What I failed to say in the speech not wanting to do any more advertising for Reuters was that our own consumer media business being already 100% digital and ad supported did not have this painful transition to make and therefore could happily remain public.

Here is the speech.

SIIA KEYNOTE

Ladies and gentlemen it’s a pleasure to be here with you this morning at the crossroads of the software and digital content industries.

When Ed Keating asked me last year whether I would come speak at this event my first reaction was to do what I’m doing a lot of these days which is to say that I’m really busy combining Reuters and Thomson and couldn’t I just take a raincheck until next year. However I then thought the better of it.

We are building Thomson Reuters to be the leading provider of information and related applications to professionals and businesses around the world. What better forum than the SIIA an organization dedicated to promoting the interests of these industries to talk a bit about my new company and the trends affecting our markets.

But I don’t think you invited me here to just deliver an advertisement for Thomson Reuters. So first what I would like to do is to continue a dialog that I’ve been putting forward on the forces shaping our industry and what the media company of the 21st century might look like. And if I have time later I’ll get to the ad.

At conferences like this one in panel discussions like those in Davos last week and in my blog and other media I’ve been pursuing a conversation – really just thinking out loud about topics in our industry that interest me.

So for example I’ve spoken and written a lot about the personalization of media – our increasing ability to each receive the custom tailored content we want in the form we want it anywhere and anytime we want it. I’ve talked about the creation of the “two-way” pipe – busting the monopoly that publishing companies have had on the means of publication and distribution since the era of Gutenberg and I’ve talked about the importance of social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies in allowing upstart new competitors to disrupt established media giants.

Today what I want to do is move this debate forward and throw out some new ideas I’ve been mulling-over in the hope that I can provoke an interesting debate among us. I recognize that it’s early on a Wednesday morning and for those of you not on European time like me I’ll take on the assignment of laying out a strawman for us all then to debate.

It’ll come as no surprise to you I’m sure that faced with the not inconsiderable challenge of planning the integration of Thomson and Reuters I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the economics of our industry. While as I will argue later the economics of professional publishing are sound I have come to the conclusion that consumer media companies are ill-suited to be widely-held public companies over the long run.

My central point is that the pace of change is so rapid in the consumer space and the investments required to keep pace are so large and the payback periods so long that it is very difficult to reconcile these attributes with the relatively short-term focus of the public equity markets.

In a recent piece in the FT Jeff Zucker of NBCU complained that the problem with new media is not that they were not attracting viewers at an impressive rate but rather that traditional media companies were replacing eyeballs which could be monetized in dollars for newer eyeballs that could only be monetized in pennies.

I think Jeff is absolutely right about this. It is certainly not a problem isolated to NBC which in fact has been one of the more progressive traditional media companies. You can see the same trend at play at newspapers which are feeling the pinch of a negative arbitrage between print classifieds and online ads as well as with everyone’s favorite canary in the coalmine the music industry which is having to sell a whole lot of 99 cent downloads to make up for the loss of hard-to-pirate CDs.

Let me give you an example of a company that has bucked this trend – BskyB in the UK. British Sky Broadcasting was the News Corp. unit which pioneered satellite subscription television in the UK and over the last 18 years or so has gone from a weak money draining endeavor which almost sank all of News Corp. to a hugely profitable $9 billion behemoth that dominates the industry.

The pattern is a familiar one to anyone who has followed the media model from the creation of the first broadcast TV stations through cable TV and now onto the internet. The start-up costs of these endeavors are huge. The early days are spent building up audience reach and the platform build-out content and marketing costs dwarf the early revenues.

Now I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a large number of these media companies are either family owned or controlled through a variety of dual class equity or similar structures. In last year’s acquisition of Dow Jones by News Corp. we can see both sides of the equation at work.

It would have been very difficult for most public companies to justify the multiple that Rupert paid for his favorite newspaper – even the Pearson owned FT which had the strongest synergy case couldn’t justify the price. But I think the transaction will ultimately yield value for News Corp. shareholders – or at least for their children.

On the other side of the equation it is precisely because the Bancroft and other Dow Jones controlling shareholders no longer were unified in their defense and promotion of a long-term objective for Dow Jones that they failed to stay the course to transition the WSJ from print to online. Once their will was broken the market did its job.

Now I happen to believe that in general the pressure of being a publicly listed company exerts a positive force on managers like myself. This has certainly been the case at Reuters and I expect it to be at Thomson Reuters as well. However as I will argue in a moment I believe that professional publishers like Thomson Reuters are more suitable entities to be publicly owned.

The core problem of consumer media companies is a mismatch in time horizons. It works well enough for a start-up which can point to leading indicators of revenue such as subscriber numbers or page views but it works very poorly for established media companies which find they need to transition in a hurry from the old model to the new. Once this transition is underway there is just no way that the new revenues from say online advertising are going to replace the disappearing old revenues from newsstand sales within any given budget year. As Jeff Zucker says we’re trying to replace dollars with pennies.

Now the proponents of efficient capital markets hypothesis among you will say that the problem lies not in the core economics but in the communication to the market. And I acknowledge that in theory shareholders should be able to recognize the long time that is required for new media revenues to grow and give the company

in transition the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately I have the public market CEO scars to cast doubt on this.

What I would like to do now is shift gears a little and explain why I think professional publishing businesses are different and perfectly well suited to public ownership – unless of course you believe that we too will have to go to an all-advertising-supported model in a hurry.

For me the key distinctions are:

1. That this is must-have information and software to do your job;

2. That your professional reputation and millions in value are at stake;

3. That it is often your employer or even an ultimate third party that pays the bill;

4. That you want just the right amount of information and not too much information and you want it in a hurry; and

5. That it is delivered at precisely the moment and in the format that fits your professional workflow.

Let me use Thomson Reuters as an example of some of the differences between the consumer media and professional publishing worlds.

Imagine you’re a lawyer preparing for a big court hearing. Imagine one day 99% of all cases and other precedents you need are available online for free and imagine you can search for them without the first 10 results being Wiki entries or paid retrievals. Would you risk your professional reputation and fee on your opponent not having the one-in-a-hundred case that blows away your argument? Not if your client was paying the research bill. It would be verging on professional negligence not to use Westlaw or perhaps Lexis.

The mission of Thomson Reuters will be simple – to be the number one provider of information and related applications in each vertical industry where knowledge workers need intelligent information to fulfill their professional obligations and do their jobs. Information that is “intelligent” because it provides insight to humans and importantly in the Web services world because it can be processed and used by machines. Information that is easily searchable by its tags or metadata that is expressed in a logical data model and is distributed via published APIs.

I think everyone is pretty familiar with the concept of machine consumption of data – so for example it’s not particularly surprising that a majority of foreign currency trading is now handled electronically. Machines on the sell-side called pricing engines which are programmed to spit out two-sided prices all day and machines on the buy-side – so-called algorithms – which are programmed to execute against this stream. At Reuters we’ve been providing such systems and data for a long time.

It is more unusual that machines are entering into the production and consumption of news. So at Reuters we’ve just introduced a product called Newscope which uses computers to “sentiment score” news stories so as to permit clients’ trading algorithms to make buy and sell decisions off stories written by journalists.

I give these examples to explain what we mean by “intelligent information”. Once we open our eyes to a world in which not only human beings are potential consumers of and purchasers of our information but the multiple computers and agents that will assist us in everything from our investment activities through our healthcare choices the opportunities for professional publishers become enormous. And because this intelligent information is needed to make vital time-critical decisions as opposed to only entertaining us individuals and firms are willing to pay real money for it.

From Day 1 Thomson Reuters will deliver intelligent information in each of the Finance Media Legal Tax & Accounting Scientific and Healthcare markets. Although finance professionals have traditionally paid the most for mission-critical content and applications lawyers accountants research scientists and healthcare professionals will also pay for services that give them the knowledge to act and make them more competitive.

In addition we will add extra value by providing the platform that lies across these verticals and by combining (or mashing-up) content from different fields to create powerful new services. So for example only Thomson Reuters will be able to satisfy the investment needs of investors in the pharma industry with not only traditional financial data but also indepth content from Thomson Scientific on (say) the probability of success of a given compound in its Phase III trials. Similarly we will be able to deliver the latest bankruptcy court developments to the distressed debt trader.

These are only a couple of examples of the synergies we expect when we combine Thomson and Reuters early in the second quarter.

I could not be more excited about the road that lies ahead and am grateful that I have been given the chance to lead what I believe will be the model of the digital content company of the 21st century.

OK – so that was my intro. I now would like to open up the discussion to the floor. I have been intentionally provocative to get a real debate going this morning so please don’t disappoint me.

Davos Part 2 – Keeping Perspective

Posted on by tomglocer
The third party service that hosts my blog has been down for a couple of days so I am only now posting items from last week’s Annual Meeting in Davos. The mood was a bit somber despite sunny weather in the Alps. One commentator observed that the Fat Cats who attend Davos are always in a good mood because they do well in up or down markets while "normal" people fear for their jobs. There is unfortunately some truth to this but I think it under-estimates the sincerity of many of the attendees to tackle issues larger than where their next paycheck will come from.
I noted that it was distinctly unfashionable to be optimistic this year but I think this is attributable in part to the natural tendency of CEOs and other leaders to not want to come off as naive or out of touch. So for example everyone remembers the ill-timed proclamation last summer by Chuck Prince the ex- CEO of Citicorp that his institution was "still dancing" as the financial services world was about to tumble into the nasty sub-prime crisis.
I think the danger here is that a recession will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ever since Bretton Woods and the abandonment of the gold standard currencies and economies have relied on trust that the little pieces of paper they printed actually stood for value. The mood of a nation often determines how much it will spend and hence the health of its economy. This is perhaps why there are so many consumer and ceo confidence studies.
What happens at events like Davos is that microphones are thrust in front of business and other leaders and they are asked their views concerning the health and direction of the economy. I think it is of little surprise that the answer is often quite negative these days. Just consider the rewards. If one is a little too conservative and the economy turns out to be better no one will complain about the out-performance. On the other hand if one paints an overly rosy picture (no matter how fact-based at the time) one will be described as being "out of touch" or "not in control" of the business.
Thus I believe that the payoff matrix is skewed in favor of being overly negative even if actual signs of a recession have not yet shown up in the figures. My suggested response is to listen carefully to the facts recited but not to assume everything is as negative as leaders will say publicly at an event like Davos. Value of course lies where the herd fears to roam.

Davos

Posted on by tomglocer
It has become fashionable to deride the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos as an endless talkfest or worse a secret cabal of evil tyrants bent on controlling the world. For several years violent protesters sought to disrupt the Meeting as if breaking the windows of McDonalds on the Promenade could turn back the forces of globalization.
So why do I go when there are so many competing demands for a CEO’s time?
First because it is a very convenient opportunity to schedule group and bilateral meetings with customers suppliers partners government officials and representatives of charitable organizations and NGOs. Why take separate trips to Redmond Palo Alto Moscow and Mumbai when you know key individuals are likely to be crowded into this small Swiss ski village conveniently early in the year?
Second because it is useful to calibrate ones thinking with business and other leaders from all over the world. Will there be a short and sharp recession in the US or a long protracted one which drags the rest of the world with it? Will Asia be "de-coupled" and what are you seeing in your business as we start the year? Taken to an extreme this form of calibration can lead to dangerous "group-think" and lemming like behavior; however it is undoubtedly useful to take soundings.
Third because one might actually learn something. I find it uniquely educational to shut my mouth and open my ears. Amid all the self-promotion are some very smart people sharing their knowledge of domains from cosmology to art from sovereign wealth funds to molecular biology.
Fourth because one can contribute something back. Whether through the mainstream WEF panels and governors meetings or in outside meetings attendees do raise their thoughts beyond the short-term issues affecting their business or organization and train their minds on what can be done to help solve some of the more intractable global problems like government corruption or the provision of decent healthcare or global warming. Just because come these issues are not fully resolved come the weekend when delegates head home does not mean that their efforts are not sincere or that no concrete follow-up action ever occurs. Only cynicism guarantees failure.
Fifth and finally because the mountains are beautiful the snow is deep and I can fit in a day of skiing over the weekend. Many of us are "normal" people too and should not be embarrassed to say so and act so.

Watching the World Through Kids’ Eyes

Posted on by tomglocer
I have been lucky over the year-end holidays to spend a lot of time with my eight- and nine- year olds. The single best part of vacation for me is not to be bound by a rigid schedule and not to have the Blackberry’s vibrating syncopations set the rhythm of my day. 
 
Over the weekend, I typically spend most of my “free” time with my wife and kids, but it is never the same as on holiday.  Even if I spend two hours at my son’s soccer practice, it is a scheduled event, crammed between a tennis game and a conference call on Sunday.  The truly great luxury and restorative power of a vacation is to live schedule-free. If one of the kids wants to windsurf for another hour, who cares?  As a wise man once said, “no man on his deathbed was ever heard to exclaim, ‘Oh, if I only had had time on earth for one more conference call’.”
 
It is especially fun for me to see how my kids interact natively with technology and online media. Long before IPTV or Joost came on the scene, they had figured out that what I called “TV” in my youth is all but converged with the PC.  I watched one of their friends once try to scroll the TV to advance the channel, so persuasive has browser navigation become.
 
These digital natives need no effort to stay up on the technology, because everything they do comes paired with an intuitive lesson in machine interaction, be it the Wii, Game Boy or You Tube.  The rest of us, the so-called “digital immigrants” need to make an effort.  Not because it would be any great cultural loss if we could not figure out how to play Halo 3, but because each wave of technology assumes you have mastered the idiom of the former.
 
I watch my 86 year old mother struggle to use the cable box, not because she has mentally checked out (far from it), but because she stopped her interactions with machines with the IBM Selectric, Telex and broadcast TV. My thesis is that whenever you stop playing with the technology of the day you maroon yourself in a time capsule.  And then one day you wake up and you can no longer figure out how to start your car or certainly tune its radio, because you missed the first week of class.
 
For me this is easy, because I am perennially amazed and amused by the innovative progress of technology.  Keeping up for me is second nature.  However, even for those who are less interested in these developments, I recommend a regular play with the latest web service or i-gadget.  The alternative, I am reminded every day by my nine-year old, is to become a “Mozart” — her generic dismissive term for anyone too old to make anything work.

Why I am Optimistic About the Music Industry

Posted on by tomglocer
Much has been written about how the music business is in terminal decline and how there is no longer any money to be made in identifying nurturing and recording talented musicians and then distributing and otherwise commercializing their music.
Things have certainly been tough in the business for the past several years but I am optimistic that the tide is about to turn. The re-invention of the music industry is a bit like the middle -east peace process: everyone knows pretty much what the ultimate solution will look like but no one has the courage to get there.
I am optimistic for several reasons: First good music continues to be created – it is a natural human impulse. Second digital technology has cut to near zero the costs of duplication and distribution (although also the cost of piracy). Third great portable devices like i-pods and mobile phones have increased the consumption of music on the go. Fourth social networking and video sites have increased the demand and the ability to share music. Fifth and finally advertising is gaining acceptance as the payment to consume "free" content.
So what will the ultimate solution look like? Undoubtedly some form of advertising supported model where the music itself ceases to be the expensive jewel that needs to be locked up in a hard copy format like an LP cassette or CD . Instead music will become the vehicle that carries advertising and that builds a brand for the artist that can be exploited via merchandising live concerts and endorsements. For this the music companies need to hold firm and sign artists to so-called "360 contracts" but this can be done.
The only question in my mind is when will the industry move to this model. To date the old model has retained its attractions to a generation of music executives who don’t see why they need to be the ones who move to a new more economic model. I recently picked up a copy of Billboard the industry bible and it was as if nothing had changed other than the ads for conferences which promised to explain the secrets of digital music. However with the sales of recorded music falling every year by double-digits I think we are close to the point where a courageous company will realize that it has little to lose by flipping the model.
In the meantime I will continue to enjoy listening to music (legally) on my 16-gig Apple i-touch.

What Should A CEO Do With His Time?

Posted on by tomglocer
Over the past several years some in the British media have suggested that I should have better things to do than spend my time on Facebook or other social networking or web services. I would certainly agree with them if this amounted to more than an hour or two a week or occurred mostly during "work" hours. However I believe it is a very worthy investment of my "free" time to explore the latest interactions of media and technology or indeed to write this blog when I feel I have something worthwhile to say.
It is undoubtedly the same pundits who think nothing of criticizing the music industry for having been too stupid to see the threats and opportunities presented by digital downloading who themselves have an outdated view of what work consists of for the senior executives of an information or technology company. Reading one of their articles or even a more worthy Mckinsey report would certainly pass muster but actual first hand experimentation is seen as a waste of time.
I strongly disagree. Growth requires innovation and unfortunately innovation is not a linear process. When Columbus "discovered" the New World he had actually set out to find a new route to India. The much admired Google similarly did not set out to invent the dominant ad monetization engine. Too much idle experimentation in the executive suite leads to a failure to execute on any plan; however the total absence of imagination leads to plans that lead nowhere.
Now it could be argued I suppose that imagination and experimentation should be left to more junior or younger staff and the chief executive should only perform "serious" duties like strategy formulation and ordering people around. I think this is a lousy and disconnected way to lead. I believe that unless one interacts with and plays with the leading technology of the age it is impossible to dream the big dreams and difficult to create an environment in which creative individuals will feel at home. This does not mean that the ceo needs to program a third-party app on Facebook but I believe it is ultimately more useful in understanding business concepts like viral marketing crowd-sourcing or federated development to use a live example rather than wait for the Harvard Business Review article to appear in three years time.
We should all feel comfortable to follow our own paths. What counts is the results not living-up to some outdated view of what "work" looks like in the 21st century.