Since I was a child, I have been myopic and won glasses. As a kid, I fought wearing glasses for years, even when I could not see the blackboard at all, for fear of being called ‘short eyes’ and worse. 

Today, I see managers doing the same. They are myopically short-sighted, cannot see the future even as it unfolds clearly, and endanger their companies, even their industries, by doing so. Today, uncorrected myopia exacts a heavy price.

The media industry is a prime example. As Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson notes in the Monday Financial Times*, “from the morning paper to the evening news, the media industry is in crisis”. PWC says global revenues from newspapers and their digital incarnations will fall 10% this year and will shed $20 b. in revenues between 2008 and 2013. Worse than airlines!

Why?

A report notes that the media industry “has failed to make the digital transition”. News organizations’ digital revenues were only 11% of total revenues, compared with 69% for the broader information industry (e.g. including legal and financial data providers like Reed Elsevier, a publisher, and Bloomberg).

Where were the industry leaders’ glasses? Were their curtains shut hermetically? Did they notice at all what happened to the music industry, which stuck to selling CD’s when the technology dictated downloads? Did they miss successful innovators in their own industry, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which shifted from newsprint to a solely digital format [see this Blog, Paradigm Shift in newspaper: Sleepless in Seattle, March 2009]?

The warnings signals were clear and powerful. Craig Newmark founded Craigslist as a service to his friends in 1995.  That was 14 years ago! Since then on-line classified advertising has exploded. Now, newspapers used to make much of their profit from their classifieds. Today, newspaper advertising, including classifieds, is down 29% in the U.S. I believe classified advertising revenues fell far more. When Craigslist appeared, did newspaper owners and managers grasp that this was a powerful paradigm shift, one they could not ignore? Why did they not see it? Did these industry leaders wait, like a condemned criminal on Death Row, for their businesses to wither and die?

A great many good people are going to lose their jobs, forever, in the media, because of the myopia of their leaders.   Perhaps we should say, as did the broadcaster in Network, “I’m mad and I’m not going to take it any more!”. If your leaders refuse to put on corrective glasses, stand up and help them see the future. Save your own job and those of your friends.
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* “Sacrifices made in hunt for new model”, Financial Times, Monday Aug. 31, 2009, p. 12.