Over 50 years ago Toyota redefined how large organisations manage their internal and external resources when they combined the efficiencies of the Ford Assembly Line with the agility of the Retail Self Serve Dispenser to create the Toyota Production System. Today these ideas have evolved into the broader concepts of the networked supply chain and lean manufacturing.
In this post I thought it would be worth while exploring how the world’s most innovative companies are leveraging these ideas to deliver on their promises and exceed customer expectations. And what, if anything, can the Newspaper Industry “take away” from adopting these best practices.
Last year AMR Research published the Supply Chain Top 50: a list of companies that “best exemplify the demand driven ideal of today’s supply chain”.
If you compare the two lists you will discover that that 9 of the Supply Chain Top 10 appear in the Business Week Top 50 we looked at in the last post on American Innovation. So clearly there is a correlation between innovation leadership and supply chain leadership.
Apple is the number 1 company on both lists. So obviously today Apple is not only recognized as the world leader in product innovation it is also recognized as the world leader in Supply Chain Management.
Today Apple, much like the Nike described ten years ago in Klein’s best selling book No Logo, is a design and marketing firm that relies on others to assist them to bring their designs to the market. And, if you are no longer in the business of making things, then you have to be able to organize others to make things for you on demand.
Today manufacturing electronic gadgets is no different to manufacturing designer clothes and accessories. The measure of success is your ability to innovate and execute in the mission critical areas of design, marketing and procurement. The rest can be, and frequently is, outsourced.
So what does this mean for the Newspaper Industry and media in general?
At the heart of No Logo was the simple message that Corporate America was no longer in the business of making things. It was now in the business of Brand Management. So it is somewhat ironic that the mass media industry completely missed Naomi Klein’s message. While the rest of the American Economy appears to have exchanged making things for the Global Branding rights America’s Media Moguls still think they are in the business of making newspapers, magazines, TV and Radio content.
In recent weeks I’ve have been following Adam Hocherman’s experience of going it alone in China and thinking just how easy it would be for the newspapers to shelve their PayWall plans and start developing their own digital micro media platform.
The newspapers have the brand, the customers and the content. All they need is a new digital distribution platform and Adam’s blog provides a ready made blueprint for anyone interested in leveraging the power of the MobCon to compete with the likes Apple, LG, Samsung and Sony in the electronic gadgets business.
How easy would it be for the New York Times or News Corp. to become the next Apple? Actually, as Adam’s experience has proven, the technology barriers to entry are negligible. The real barrier for the newspaper industry is cultural. The challenge then is for the newspaper industry to re-imagine who and what it wants to be in the future.
It could try and acquire the future but acquiring the future can be very expensive and risky enterprise. For it to succeed, if the new acquisition is to reinvigorate the old, the acquirer has to be prepared to embrace the new.
Yet all too often we discover the old simply feeds on the new. For many global acquirers innovative start-ups are little more than corporate fast food. You could say that they satisfy the urge but they don’t feed the profit engine because all too often the Mergers and Acquisitions equation looks more like 1+1=½ than the much touted 1+1=3.
Most analysts think Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A’s) are all about financials and synergies. The reality is M&A’s are all about culture and social interaction. The shock and the clash of the old and the new. The barriers to success are cultural and that’s why MBA programs would probably be better off teaching the impact of Game Theory and the mathematics of social interaction than presenting endless case studies on Global Merger and Acquisitions programs.
Clearly, if newspapers are to evolve, they will have to do it internally. They will have to rediscover the Corporate Innovation DNA that is buried deep within their culture and that will be very hard. What they face today is the classic “Innovator’s Dilemma”.
They can only begin this journey by discovering and exploring what this new generation is doing with media today.
Today it’s all about the mobile phone. It’s an extension of the new generation. When they choose a phone they are not just choosing a mobile communications or gaming device. They asking themselves “who am I” and more importantly “who do I want to be?”. The phone is an expression of their personality. When it is on display in the public theatre its is saying to their peers “look, see, this is who I am”.
In the 1960’s you could profile a potential customer by the Newspaper they read or the TV program they watched. Today it is the mobile phone they carry and that’s why Apple is winning, and the newspapers are losing, the race to own the future of the MobCon.
GB
January 13, 2011
Sorry, I had to steal it, too good! (: