While I was working on this report:

I was also reading Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near.  While you may disagree with Kurzweil's conclusions about the future of artificial intelligence, one thing you can't disagree with is his primary point that the pace of change itself is changing. 

I'll blog about this book more in the future, but what's on my mind today is how the media industry is operating at the edge of exponential change.  Technology markets are changing so rapidly that new innovations seem like new litters of rabbits appearing in the blackberry bushes.  Keeping pace with the boatload of new products, new features and new methods of communication seems almost impossible.  As one of our interviews from the report, NBC News VP Lyne Pitts "There's nothing to be ashamed of feeling like you are on the edge in a strategy of chaos."

First you have to realize, accept and then celebrate that business is shifting all around and chaos is here to stay.  Get ready to ride the ups and downs because we are all in for a lot of change and it's going to be those who love the choas that succeed.

Everyone should have a chance to sit across the table from Allen Blue.  Allen is a co-founder of LinkedIn.  And if you haven’t noticed it, LinkedIn is growing faster than the weeds in your garden.  About 200,000 people per week.

Allen has an erudite style.  Hard to believe he is an entrepreneur because he sounds more like a professor.  He waxed philosophical about the value of iteration – trying something new and then tweaking it as you go along.  In effect, new ideas get perfected by the community of the many instead of the management ‘few’. 

I love his point, “We make it up as we go along.  If you ask consumers about your ideas, they will say, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’  It’s better to build something light-weight and see if we can innovate effectively and then iterate.”

It’s this brave innovation that contributes to LinkedIn’s success.  The ability to be willing to endure continual feedback, even if it’s negative, is a sign of strength and one of the web values of intimacy with your consumers.  Better to have your consumers co-create with you than launch something with your initials and ego all over it.

While researching innovation and the media for Northwestern University's Media Management Center, I was impressed by a guy named Rob Curley.  Rob is VP Development and runs a skunk works organization for the Washington Post.  What's great is the ability of his small team of 5 people to jettison the whole company into new and creative markets on the web.

They work as a small company within a large one and have the speed and flexibility to do things virtually overnight.  They were one of the first news media firms to design a successful widget for Facebook. Here's how they are organized vis-a-vis the 300 person washingtonpost.com team:

Our team has its own dedicated programmer; he’s been working with us for a long time so he knows how programming relates to journalism. This is a guy who practices his journalism with code instead of with sentences. We have a full-time dedicated senior designer who’s also a motion graphics animator and a Flash developer. Then we have two multimedia journalists — one in an editor’s role and one in a producer’s role, but both can do just about everything. They can write very well-written news stories, they can produce daily audio podcasts, they can shoot and edit video. You throw something at them and they can probably do it, or they’re going to figure out how to do it. They’re kind of jack-of-all-trades when it comes to storytelling.

“Then the fifth member of our team is this really smart guy who has the strangest role on our team. In fact, we had to make up a whole new title for him and that’s ‘Journalism Technology Specialist.’ He’s a weird guy because he’s a dang fine journalist; he can really write well and understands new media journalism really well, but he can also code a little bit, he can write CSS. Basically, this guy sits between the journalism and the technology. So once all the code has been written, all the sites have been designed, all the Flash animations have been built, all the stories have been written, all the virtual reality photos have been taken, he’s the guy who assembles all of that. And that makes him a pretty useful guy to have around.'

Rob was telling me about a hyper-local site they developed for Loudoun County, VA - one of the fastest growing counties in the DC area.  It's called Loudounextra.com. Rob's group wanted to include a list of all the restaurants in the county. Someone suggested they buy the data from the Yellow Pages.  Imagine all the time, money and debugging that would take for addresses and phone numbers.  Instead, their staff called every restaurant in the county, found out opening and closing time, pricing, type of cuisine, details that brought value to using the site.  With free Google database software, it was done - fast, cheap AND good.

Conventional thinking is that skunk works organizations are good for ideation but present problems when ideas scale and you have to assimilate the products and services back into the larger organization.  That's the beauty of the technology of content companies however.  The software itself creates the scaling.  Watch for even better innovations coming from washingtonpost.com. 

I spent the better part of the summer interviewing 36 leaders in the news media on their strategies for innovation.  Northwestern University's Media Management Center commissioned my firm to conduct the research study and formulate recommendations for action.  Listening to how these leaders are handling the seismic changes in their industry was fascinating. Wow. Great stuff. 

From the publisher of the Washington Post to the founder of Twitter, I got a download on how the pace of change in the market is forcing media companies to work in new ways.  In the next few blogs, I'll be sharing some of my insights from the study.  You can view the entire report here:  http://www.mediamanagementcenter.org/innovation/innovationreport.pdf

One thing I heard again and again was the difficulty many of these folks had managing the present and the future at the same time.  Because the pace of change itself is changing, there is increasing pressure on leaders.  I'll be sharing some of the ways firms can keep one hand in the present and step into the future at the same time.