Save Your News Job: Learn Innovation Lingo Now
Here are 10 Tips on How to Save Your Job, especially if you work in a newspaper newsroom. Pay special attention to the bold italicized words, I guarantee that they will be coming to your newsroom soon, and those who use them will survive, those who don’t … well how are your grocery bagging skills?
Your tasks will get progressively difficult, but you don’t have to master all of this immediately because the first principle is:
1. Perfection is the enemy of “good enough”, make that your mantra. Even Bill Clinton uses it.
2. Display these two books by Clayton M. Christensen (don’t forget the M.) prominently on your cubicle shelf:
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fall
The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
PJNet.org Exclusive Tips and Tricks:
You can probably buy these books used on Amazon. Order well thumbed and underlined ones. You want to invest a little and learn a lot, the underlines will save you time and time is short, you will leverage the unsuspecting underliner’s collaborative thinking, all of which will make it appear that you really are Innovation Team material.
3. Have well marked-up print-out pages of Newspaper Next: Blueprint for Transformation scattered about on your desk. It’s the source for the majority of this insightful information.
4. Display this sign prominently on your cubicle wall: The Information Highway Starts Here.
5. If another reporter or low-rung editor asks you about the books or sign, just brush off the questions. They are probably irredeemable, old thinking, stale-minded, journalism-focused hacks. Just an appearance of association with old media types could cost you your job.
6. However, if a corporate type or high level editor asks about your sign or reading material, say this, “You know I no longer consider myself just a journalist, I see myself as an information provider, an innovator who wants to build a portfolio of new ways of collecting information, especially for our nonconsumers who are not using our core product.”
7. Then you must add, ” Let’s brainstorm and then form an Innovation Team to discover what jobs these nonconsumers need to get done but can’t by themselves. And then let’s think like disruptive innovators to help them get their jobs done.” (Look starry eyed, energized.)
8. Be sure to drop this simple Harvard business school axiom from Ted Levitt somewhere in the discussion: “Customers don’t want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter inch holes.” Get it? If not, then actually read the books and the blueprint. This comes mostly from the N2 blueprint: “Focus on the holes, not on the drills stupid.”
9. That’s how Harvard business school people think–Christensen is from Harvard–and now Harvard-MBA-think is about to come flying into your newsroom thanks to this American Press Institute commissioned N2 blueprint.
10. Finally, above all be an idea enabler and when you come up with an idea give it a clever name. Here are two project prototypes that have already been proposed thanks to Innovation-Team thinking: MasterMom and FoodPsycho.com. MasterMom was developed by the Mommy Team at the Dallas Morning News. FoodPsycho.com actually came out of a Gannett newsroom, which means there is hope that this N2 Blueprint for Transformation might save the information innovators, who we formerly knew as journalists.
PJNet.org Bonus Tip: Don’t be a sucker. Take their "http://pjnet.org/weblogs/pjnettoday/archives/001312.html">money, time and resources and turn the place into the best news and information center in the world.
Update one month later: Nov. 4, 2006: If you think I was joking, then see this story I blogged today on Gannett rechristening its newsrooms as information centers.
