Some ideas

I was listening to Simon Cole give a presentation earlier today about value creation in the media industry these days. Overall I think the message was very much in line with intuition, but the two items that I thought worth picking out from there were related to inertia and to democratization.

I've often talked about inertia and I'm increasingly confident that in the longer run the negative aspects of inertia will outweigh the relative benefits of being big once the basic infrastructure for companies matures and does not penalize for smallness as much as it used to. In respect to dinosaurs attempting to rejuvenate themselves, Simon cited the interesting anecdote about how Disney sets aside money to a fund from which some employees can request capital to launch their companies that aim to kick Disney underneath its belt. The assumption naturally is that if you succeed in doing that, Disney will own you and thus learn from it and potentially embrace the disruption you either identified or triggered. As an idea that is brilliant and I think more companies should actively try to spar themselves with these types of initiatives. The most recent example to come to mind is of Mark Zuckerberg making an investment in Diaspora.

The second thing was Simon's comment on how Sky News gives first priority to the time-to-market of news whereas BBC emphasizes qualitative issues and will spend time to double-check stories before running them. The interesting bit here is if you think about how this actually is another situation where the underlying dynamic is that of democratization and giving the people responsibilities and freedom, or in this case that the consumer should do the editorial bit of the news process themselves. Not surprisingly with everything that's floating around on the internet, I guess most are becoming very information-savvy and are, hopefully, able to do basic fact checking and apply common sense to weed through the news. So interestingly this links back to the dynamic where things are getting chopped up into smaller pieces and individuals are becoming more empowered and free.

Amusingly enough I guess neither of these points directly related to the topic at hand, but then again, weak ties are often the source of the most interesting things.