Next week at the Business Information & Media Summit, Education Week’s Matthew Cibellis and I are going to speak on this topic.

The Winning Equation: Marketing + Editorial + IT = Breakthrough Results Publishers Love.

The internet and ubiquitous digital delivery of content is putting the publishing industry through some interesting changes. Change can be hard. Some people resist the change and deny what’s going on around them, while others use the time of transition as an opportunity to turn everything on its head.

It’s like navigating between Scylla and Charybdis. On one side we can dig our feet in the sand and “stay true to who we are” — and become irrelevant. On the other we can embrace a kind of change that wants us to abandon everything we’ve learned about what publishing is and ought to be.

Matthew and I think there’s a solution to this. There is a course between these extremes.

In the context of publishing, and more specifically in the context of new product development, there seem to be two options to move forward. The first is to be (or hire) The Disrupter. The second is to be (or hire) The Diplomat.

You know The Disrupter. He’s the hot-shot business school graduate who never misses the opportunity to say that everything is different now, and we have to change or die. Your old-fashioned ideas don’t work, and we’re going to move in a new direction whether you like it or not. Either get on the bus or get run over.

You know the drill. Print is dead. Newspapers are dying, and so is the old publishing model. Editors have to become businessmen, and social media mavens, and bloggers, and ….

We need a revolution to survive. We need a change agent. A “leader” who wants to fire everybody and start fresh.

I suppose this works some of the time, but in my experience it’s usually a catastrophe that hastens the demise of the company. It alienates the staff, confuses your customers, diminishes your brand, and simply wastes precious time.

After everybody in the company has been beaten senseless by the “change agent,” there are still issues to write, publication deadlines to meet, and new technologies to address. The owners come out of this mess realizing a few important things:

• First, people don’t really change that much. Even under the threat of losing their livelihood, editors simply don’t want to become marketers.
• Second, there are reasons why different functional groups have different personalities and different ways of seeing and doing things. Maybe editors should have a little bit more of a business focus, but you do want editors who have a professional detachment from the business side. At least a little.

The same applies to other areas as well. Some of the best IT people aren’t social butterflies, and some very good marketers need some help with their grammar. That’s okay.

Now, someone will object that “getting on the bus” doesn’t mean that editors have to become marketers and programmers have to be motivational speakers. “Getting on the bus” means adapting to the new vision.

Right.

But why, then, all the talk about “everything is different;” and “your jobs will change;” and “the old ways don’t work anymore”? What the staff hears is “but that means you want me to be one of them!“

This is why we need The Diplomat.

The truth is that everyone in publishing knows that they have to change. We’ve all seen the transition from people avoiding each other behind newspapers to people avoiding each other behind shiny little screens. We get it, okay? It’s a different world and some things have to change.

But change how, and change what? And does the business school guy really know all that about … well, everything? Is he going to tell an editor who’s been working his beat for 25 years how to do his job? Of course not. You can change people incrementally, but generally speaking … they don’t change much. They also have institutional and industry knowledge that you need.

To manage this kind of change, you need diplomacy. You need to learn the personalities and strengths of the people you have and adapt your methods and strategies accordingly.

There is no single magic method from a Harvard Business School paper that’s going to apply to every publishing company.

You can learn to deploy the strengths of the people you have. If you have a worrier, how can a worrier help you? If you have an OCD person, how can he contribute? If you have a social butterfly, or a guy with aspergers, how can that personality and those gifts promote the mission of the group?

In other words, you have to do a very hard and old-fashioned thing, which is to manage people.

Your employees already know that publishing is a mess and their job is on the line. Help them to buy in to new ideas by presenting those ideas in a way that respects their personality and their professional integrity.

You don’t need to brow beat people. All you’ll do is make them nervous and often unproductive. Instead, consider looking at the issues and the challenges from their point of view and finding ways to motivate them according to their professional and personal goals.

In our session at #BIMS15, Matthew Cibellis is going to speak about how he used this sort of approach with his editorial team, and I’m going to talk about how to use it with IT. During the presentation, we’ll ask the audience to chime in with how these same principles can be applied to other parts of the company. We hope to see you there.