This book is a goldmine. Seriously.
John Wilpers and Juan Senor, editors of the Innovation in Magazine Media 2015-2016 World Report introduce the book, a goldmine packed with proven successes.
You could give this book to your editorial, sales, and web teams, and they’d have a roadmap to a profitable, expansive, exciting future.
Except for one thing.
It’s a safe bet that most of your team would not feel empowered or skilled enough to do many, if not most, of these things.
We have found in working with media companies around the world that the enemy of innovation is not a lack of ideas but a crippling, top-down, rigid, out-of-date corporate culture.
The enemies within are the archaic job descriptions, workflows, organisational structures, equipment, software, and even the architecture — the walled offices and cubical farms — that combine to thwart innovation, integration and collaboration.
Innovative ideas are dead on arrival.
Don’t waste your time reading this book until you make one critical commitment: Commit to changing your corporate culture.
Commit to becoming digital-first, to integrating your teams, to encouraging and rewarding innovative thinking. Commit to collecting data and interpreting it and using it to help guide editorial and advertising decisions.
Commit to empowering your staff to think innovatively, to take risks without fear of failure or retribution.
And please do not do this in a top-down fashion.
Involve your entire organisation. Recruit volunteers from every department (they know a lot more than you do about what’s working and not working on the ground).
Report progress widely and often.
Create a culture that generates ideas, not a culture that reacts (negatively) to ideas you impose on them after attending a conference.
Once you’ve made the commitment, use this book to help formulate your plan of action. Share the book with your teams. Dive deeply into the details of proven successes and apply the lessons.
This book is a valuable tool for you and your team. It represents a three-year process of moving from prognostications about what might work (the 2013 book), to prescriptions for what should work (2014), to this year’s details for action plans.
The ideas in this book work.
In decades of consulting around the world, we have helped companies make that commitment to change. That transformation alone re-energises the organisation. It paves the way for subsequent innovations that result in red ink becoming black, demoralised staff becoming enthusiastic change agents, and a dark future becoming promising and exciting.
So, don’t just get it and turn the page. Make that commitment first.
Order Innovation in Magazine Media 2015-2016 World Report today: the most in-depth book about creative media thinking that we have ever published.
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