Entries for month: December 2010
Are newspapers just too good to change?
15 December 2010 · By Kylie Davis
Is the reason why newspaper companies find change so damned difficult because we are just so damned good at what we do?
I'll explain.
Capability theory argues that there is a tipping point in the life of every company and industry when the skills, values and processes that make a company talented and successful actually start to become rigidities that prevent future success.
Capabilities are found in the resources that we have as newspaper companies in money and people — the processes and procedures we use and the common values we hold. Capabilities are different to plain old resources because a capability is the ability to turn something into something else — it's our ability to take action. Newspapers can turn random facts, events and goings on in the world into a cohesive, contextual assessment that explains the world each day to billions of readers and sets agendas globally every day (or even now, each hour) and we have processes and procedures that allow this to happen. That's one hell of a capability. Those processes have, in turn, become values which now underpin our cultures.
Yet rigidities are where those capabilities that have calcified. Companies often stick to current capabilities beyond their useful life because of tradition, complacency or an inability to learn.
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