Scott Porad, the CTO of the company behind FailBlog.org and I Can Has Cheezburger?, highlights what hinders innovation at news organizations – and every other big company – in a recent blog post that actually made no mention of the news industry.
Some people view the world with rose-colored glasses. Mine are journo-colored, I guess.
So I immediately identified with Porad’s post, titled Corporate/Startup, and the contrast between working at corporate news organizations (which I did for 15 years) with working at a startup (which I’ve been doing for seven months now).
The discussion centered on the difference between the type of person that chooses to work at corporate jobs vs. those that are drawn to startup companies. Porad concludes that the balance between time spent doing vs. planning is the most significant determining factor. And I completely agree.
Over an 8 year period, my last startup grew from a startup into a corporate environment with several hundred employees and layers of management. For the last 5 or 6 years of that I felt like we spent 80% of our time planning and only 20% of our time doing stuff.
To me, this very frustrating. I enjoy just doing stuff, and I felt like all my time was spent discussing/debating/arguing with others about what we should be doing, instead of just doing stuff to see what worked. A lot of the time it felt like we were just paralyzed in planning…literally gridlock.
Frustrating, indeed. Anyone who works for a news organization (or other large corporation, for that matter) can weave tales of woe around all the planning, brainstorming, off-site retreats and other groupthinks that led nowhere. Isn’t it ironic that news companies, given a breaking news event, quickly break out of “paralysis by analysis” and move at breakneck speed to cover the news, print extra copies and provide bonus coverage on the air or online?
So here’s today’s “breaking news:” your business is in trouble. Stop planning and start doing.
Easier said than done, I know. Porad, who estimates that his current startup spends 5% of their time planning and 95% doing, pinpoints the difference between an established company and a startup when it comes to planning vs. progress.
I think the most important difference is that we have a very clear vision of what we want to do. This allows us to make decisions about what to work on quickly and easily. I always thought my old company was paralyzed because there wasn’t a very clear vision or plan or strategy. As a result, we couldn’t just do stuff was because nobody could even agree on the general direction that the stuff should be headed.
But, there were other reasons too: the company had a culture that was risk-averse and punished failure — success was the only option.
News organizations haven’t been able to transform from a perfectionist, command-and-control culture into a free-thinking startup, though many have tried through programs like The Learning Newsroom. So it’s time to break the problem into small, digestible chunks (which is another concept Porad wrote about recently).
How to bring a startup culture into the newsroom:
1. Divide and conquer: Pick 2-3 small teams and give them decision-making authority. In other words, allow them to launch anything the whole team agrees is worth trying. But pick the right people. Remember, there are certain types of people who prefer planning to progress. That’s not who you want.
2. We report, you decide: Use the weekly or monthly meetings that normally serve to seek clearance on new projects as a progress update. So instead of “we’d like your blessing to try this new approach,” the message would be “we are trying this new approach and this is what we’ve seen so far.”
3. Don’t let money stop you: If it’s a service that costs money, don’t waste time traveling up the chain of command to get approval. Either ask the vendor for a free trial (good service providers will be flexible, especially in this climate), or if it’s an online technology, look for an open source solution or find another news organization that will share some code.
Ryan Thornburg has been riffing on this lately, too. He argues that “innovation isn’t enough” and urges newsrooms to get past the idea of “innovation” and adopt a more defined experimentation approach. He even offers a “failure form” that can be used “by reporters and editors who want to pursue a crazy idea.”
Personally, I’m energized every day because with my startup company I can focus on progress ahead of planning. There were days when I was working in the newsroom when I’d come home and my wife would ask me how my day went. I’d stop and think for a moment and realize I did nothing but go to meetings and answer emails. So basically I had nothing to show for 9-10 hours of “work.”
Some people are OK with this. I’m just not one of them.
Mark Briggs 
Posted in 
I agree completely with this. I worked at a college paper that has a very structured and corporate culture (believe it or not). Though planning can be helpful, if the company has a vision and good knowledge of how to best articulate it and bring it to fruition, planning should then serve as a small portion of the days work for all involved. Plus, a lot of times you don’t really know what will work until you try it. It doesn’t matter how much you plan.
Startup culture vs corporate culture is one of the reasons that, when industries change, the incumbents usually get replaced by the new players.
The biggest hurdle, though is this:
“the difference between the type of person that chooses to work at corporate jobs vs. those that are drawn to startup companies.”
In many ways, for newspapers to morph and compete in the new marketplace, they need to be able to fire everyone who is a corporate type and hire startup people. Again, easier said than done.
Thank you for the very thoughtful post…I’m glad my blog inspired you!
An additional thought regarding the paragraph starting with:
2. We report, you decide: Use the weekly…
reminds me of something I was told recently (although I can’t remember by whom): the key to success in the new media business is experimentation and learning; those who can learn the fastest will win.
Thanks for the comments, guys.
I just finished an article in the most recent Inc. magazine with Paul Graham on the cover. In it he says: “Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly. But working for a large company is like being waterboarded.”
If you don’t feel like your company is waterboarding you, you’re probably not meant for a startup. Or the “fail fast, fail often” culture that is needed to reinvent old media companies.
Gotta say, this is going on the assumption that the newsroom has enough of the people with right skills and attitude to make a change.
Attitude, seems likely.
Skills not so likely.
I’m a person from a startup background working in a newsroom now and I have to say, it’s been a huge, frustrating adjustment. I’m used to shooting an idea back and forth with a handful of people and executing within a couple of days. If it fails, it fails and you try something else. But in the newsroom it’s just meeting after meeting after meeting and almost nothing ever comes of it. We are too management/editor-heavy when what we really need are reporters/content producers.
This is pretty good, though I dont think a 5% planning 95% doing is the correct ratio…indeed there is an infamously abundance of time wasted on planning in the corp. world, but let’s be real: what’s the survival ratio of startups in the last 15 years?
History of startups has been to promote with conviction and enthusiasm, and hope you can catch up to your promises in the time between…when stuff starts falling through the cracks, you lose credibility, you lose audience, you lose funding.
planning has been around for thousands of years, it’s a not a new concept…unlike twitter.com.
just sayin
Awesome infographic, but fast forwarding to today, since all the buzz has died down, Google+ is still no where near Facebook. The adoption rate just simply isn’t really there. People are as well entrenched in their facebook network to make the switch.
I will be putting this dzazinlg insight to excellent use in no time.
You have mentioned very interesting points ! ps decent website . “Every man over forty is a scoundrel.” by George Bernard Shaw.