The subject of 'Workflow' has had a bit of an airing recently. So, I'm wondering what that means exactly. I have a vague idea how Worklfow solutions might operate in the legal arena, it's less clear to me how this might work in an Academic/Business School setting.

Until I found Zemanta.

This is my first post with Zemanta/Scribefire. Scribefire I've been using for sometime and it's without doubt the best, easiest and discrete blogging support software there is.

After adding the Zemanta add-on I now have the ability to include related posts and add them to the end of the post.

Wow! pretty neat and and a great example of adding context to content to give better cues about the nature of the post and the intended audience.

Perhaps workflow is the wrong term here, perhaps performance support or task support is more appropriate?

By Art Jahnke and Jessica Ullian - From the Boston University newsletter.

Barbara Millen, a MED professor of medicine who cochaired the University Council committee that recommended the open access initiative, says that it will "really highlight the tremendous productivity of our faculty." Photo courtesy of Barbara Millen

Boston University took a giant step towards greater access to academic scholarship and research on February 11, when the University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit. Click here to download the full pdf.

“We believe this is the first time that a university as a whole has taken a stand on behalf of the university as opposed to a single school or college,” says Wendy Mariner, the chair of the Faculty Council and a professor at the School of Law, at the School of Public Health, and at the School of Medicine. “We are looking forward to new forms of publication in the 21st century that will transform the ways that knowledge and information are shared.”

“The resolution passed by our University Council is a very important statement on the importance of open access to the results of scholarship and research created within the University,” says BU President Robert A. Brown. “The digital archive called for in the resolution will become a great repository for the creativity of our faculty and students.”

The council vote has approved an initiative to establish an archive of the research and scholarship produced by the faculty of the University. Mariner says that one goal is to make it easier for faculty to be able to share their own research with students and colleagues.

The increased ownership and control is good news for researchers such as Barbara Millen, a professor and chair of the graduate nutrition program at the School of Medicine. Working on a book about nutrition research at one point in her career, Millen found herself in the paradoxical position of having to seek permission to use her own data after it was published in a journal that retained the copyright to her work. The challenge, says Millen, who cochaired the University Council committee that recommended the open access initiative, will be providing faculty with the tools to make their research available online.

“Open access will really highlight the tremendous productivity of our faculty,” says Millen. “Among the more important things needed to make it work is a collaboration between the libraries and our faculty to get their research onto the Web. It’s not an inconsequential task.”

Traditionally, academic journal publishers have used subscriptions to cover the costs of printing, marketing, and distribution. Many also charge a per-page fee to researchers whose work they publish, which can add up to thousands of dollars. The journals control access to the published papers, because they often hold exclusive copyright. Thanks to the Internet, printing presses and expensive distribution networks are no longer needed, but there are still costs for editing, marketing, and other logistics, even for online journals, and open-access journals typically charge scholars a flat processing fee to cover these costs. For example, BioMed Central, the for-profit publisher of Environmental Health, charges authors $1,700.

Some universities, such as the University of California, are footing the bill for their faculty’s open-access publishing fees, and in other cases, researchers have included these fees as a line item in their grant applications. At least one major source of grants, the National Institutes of Health, recently mandated that any research it funds must be open-access within a year after publication.

Last year, according to an editorial in Environmental Health, only about 10 percent of published scientific articles were accessible without restrictions. But a 2006 survey by the Washington, D.C.–based Association of Research Libraries found that 43 percent of its member universities and research institutions already had open-access archives and 35 percent were planning one. “Open access is an irresistible tide,” says David Ozonoff, a professor of environmental health at SPH and an editor-in-chief of Environmental Health. “The publishers see this. They’ve been trying to prevent it, but it’s impossible.”

News of the University Council vote was welcomed by Robert Hudson, the director of Mugar Memorial Library, and as cochair of the University Council committee on scholarly activities and libraries, a key force behind the move toward open access. Hudson says the effort to maintain an up-to-date collection of scholarly journals costs the University approximately $8 million a year. Annual subscription rates can reach $20,000 and tend to increase 6 to 10 percent each year; as a result, expanding the library’s scholarly archive has been a financial challenge.

“This vote sends a very strong message of support for open and free exchange of scholarly work,” says Hudson. “Open access means that the results of research and scholarship can be made open and freely accessible to anyone. It really has increased the potential to showcase the research and scholarship of the University in ways that have
not been evident to people.”

Market rebels and radical innovation
In this adaptation from Hayagreeva Rao’s book, he explains the role of activists in making or breaking new markets, products, and services.

JANUARY 2009 • Hayagreeva Rao
Strategy, Innovation Article, Market rebels and radical innovation
In This Article

Activists who challenge the status quo play a critical but often overlooked role in both promoting and impeding radical business innovation. Their importance stems from the very nature of innovation, which frequently challenges existing interests, norms, values, social practices, and relationships. As a result, the joined hands of market rebels—activists and their recruits—have with surprising frequency exerted significant influence on market acceptance of breakthrough products and services.

For example, nearly all of the technical aspects associated with personal computing were available by 1972, but the PC didn’t take off until a few years later when hobbyists, rebelling against centralized computing, organized groups such as the Homebrew Computer Club. These clubs were spawning grounds for actors—such as inventors, founders of companies like Apple, and developers of programs and games—who collectively established the market for personal computers and eventually stimulated the entry of larger companies. Similarly, the hybrid car succeeded partly because market rebels in the environmental movement paved the way by arousing collective enthusiasm for “green” causes among consumers and regulators.

By contrast, radical innovations (such as the Segway personal transporter) have often floundered because their developers overlooked the social and cultural mobilization needed to excite their targeted consumers. More striking, the deaf rights movement slowed adoption of the cochlear implant—thought of by its makers as a cure for deafness because children who used it could more easily acquire language skills—by painting it as an innovation that presaged the loss of sign language and the destruction of the deaf community. In France, for example, a deaf coalition called Sourds en Colère (Deaf Anger) organized demonstrations against doctors who promoted cochlear implants.
Video: Hayagreeva Rao on Market Rebels
Hayagreeva Rao explains the role of activists in making or breaking innovations.
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These examples and many others hold valuable lessons for executives pursuing innovation. The costs to consumers of adopting such innovations are high because adopters have to topple existing conventions. Stimulating collective endeavors that initiate social change can be a critical part of reshaping markets.

To do so, companies must understand how market rebels forge a collective identity and mobilize support. Crucial for many activists is articulating a “hot cause,” which arouses emotion and creates a community of members, and relying on “cool mobilization,” which signals the identity of community members while sustaining their commitment. Companies also can boost their odds of harnessing the power of collective action by employing the right tactics, such as emphasizing two-way communication with consumers. Above all, a mind-set shift is needed: managers hoping to foster and encourage the diffusion of radical innovation need to start thinking like insurgents. Those who do so are likely to become more effective at influencing their own organizations too.
Hot causes and cool mobilization

Activists face a conundrum: should one concentrate on changing beliefs first or modifying behavior first? Hot causes and cool mobilization help to address this issue. Hot causes mobilize passions and engender new beliefs, and cool mobilization triggers new behavior while allowing new beliefs to develop. Together, they foster the development of new identities and the defense of old ones.

By hot causes I mean those that inspire feelings of pride or anger. These emotions can be critical for overcoming another important challenge activists face: arousing to action individuals who are usually busy, distracted, uninvolved, or apparently powerless—and therefore reluctant to invest time and energy. A classic example is the quality movement that transformed the American automobile industry in the 1980s. One could have expected quality improvements to be undertaken by companies as a result of normal profit incentives. However, American automobile producers overlooked quality and initially disregarded Japanese innovations concerning quality circles. It was only after a threat was named—the death of the American automobile industry—that quality activists were able to mobilize support for quality institutes and initiatives.

Like hot causes, cool mobilization activates emotion and enables the formation of new identities, but it does so by engaging audiences in new behaviors and experiences that are improvisational and insurgent. The origins of the word cool can be traced to jazz musicians revolting against the legacy of Louis Armstrong, who had become synonymous with “hot jazz.” I use the word here to capture the insurgent and improvisational dimensions of the jazz of such rebels as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. The key to cool mobilization is engaging audiences through collective experiences that generate communities of feeling, in which audience members don’t just have their emotions roused but encounter what literary critic Raymond Williams has called “social experiences in solution.” Consider the recycling movement, which seeks to promote sustainable use of resources and rests on the daily ritual of carefully segregating glass, plastic, and paper so they can be put to later use.

Together, hot causes and cool mobilization power collective action, and collective action creates or constrains markets. Hot causes intensify emotions and trigger new beliefs. Cool mobilization also evokes emotion, but it does so by engaging participants in new collective experiences that transform beliefs. Hot causes are highly defined, and their definitions give them emotional resonance. Cool mobilization is less clearly defined and requires conscious participation—indeed, participants have to “fill out” the experience through their actions and experimentation. Both underlie the formation of new identities.

In the personal-computing movement, the hot cause was the tyranny of the central computer; the sources of cool mobilization were hobbyist clubs and, arguably, the PC itself. In the deaf rights movement, the hot cause was the cochlear implant—billed as a tool of cultural genocide. The cool mobilization came from deaf rights groups that used unconventional techniques—such as performing mime skits depicting French doctors performing operations on blood-covered children—to arouse public interest.
Market rebels in action

The joined hands of market rebels can make or break radical innovations by exploiting hot causes and cool mobilization in many of the markets that affect our daily lives. It’s easy to forget as we drive cars, drink beer, and take medicine that these markets have been shaped by social movements.
Rebels in new markets: Cultural acceptance of the car

The car, a radical invention that promised to transform the experience of transportation, was an extremely hot cause. In 1895, when the automobile industry was just beginning, the gasoline-powered car was poorly understood, notoriously unreliable, and reviled by vigilante antispeeding organizations. Colonel Albert Pope, a bicycle manufacturer who went on to make electric cars, could not fathom why anyone would use gas-powered ones, asserting, “You can’t get people to sit over an explosion.” And a lawmaker in Massachusetts suggested that motorists fire Roman candles at approaching horse-drawn carriages to warn them of the arrival of the car.

Yet as early as 1906, commentator Frank Munsey noted that the “uncertain period of the automobile is now past. It is no longer a theme for jokers, and rarely do we hear the derisive expression, ‘Get a horse.’” Henry Ford is widely regarded as the man who established the automobile industry by automating production and driving down prices so the car could reach the masses. But it wasn't until 1913 that Ford installed the moving assembly line in Highland Park, Michigan, to produce the Model T—long after the car became taken for granted. What’s more, Ford benefited from laws licensing drivers and mandating speed limits—and he didn’t lobby or otherwise agitate for those rules.

Ford didn’t need to, because a social movement powered by automobile clubs comprising car enthusiasts played a central role in legitimating the automobile and presenting it as a modern solution to the problem of transportation. These enthusiasts (primarily doctors and other professionals) were rebels who flouted convention, abandoned the horse-drawn carriage for the automobile, and sought to popularize its use. Neither sponsored nor financed by car manufacturers, the clubs were both social in nature and focused on improving quality, shielding car owners from legal harassment, and promoting the construction of good roads. Club involvement enabled members to construct an identity built around a new consumer role. By 1901, 22 clubs had mushroomed in cities from Boston to Newark to Chicago.

In addition to working with state governments to draft laws licensing cars and mandating speed limits, automobile clubs organized reliability contests that pitted cars against one another in endurance, hill climbing, and fuel-economy runs. Each contest—a cool mobilization if there ever was one—was widely viewed as a test that proved to audiences that the automobile was reliable. The first reliability contest was in 1895; by 1912 the contests were discontinued because organizers recognized that the automobile had become a social fact.

Even Henry Ford needed to win a race in order to achieve the transition from engineer to entrepreneur. In a celebrated 1901 race, Ford, then an upstart producer, defeated the better-established Alexander Winton. Ford’s wife, Clara, later described the scene after Ford took the lead in a letter to her brother, Milton Bryant: “The people went wild. One man threw his hat up, and when it came down, he stamped on it. Another man had to hit his wife on the head to keep her from going off the handle. She stood up in her seat . . . screamed, ‘I’d bet $50 on Ford if I had it.’” The public acclaim that Ford received enabled him to create the Ford Motor Company in 1903.
Rebels in established markets: Microbrewing

September 26, 1997, was a watershed day in the history of the modern brewing industry in America: the Institute of Brewing Studies announced that the number of breweries in the United States exceeded those in Germany. In comparison to the 1,234 breweries in Germany, the United States boasted 1,273 breweries, and of them 1,250 were microbrewers—up from 8 in 1980.

Why did microbreweries start proliferating in the 1980s? An important piece of the puzzle was the legalization by the US Congress of home brewing, on February 1, 1979. This legislation legitimated a movement that had been gaining steam for several years. By 1984, the American Homebrewers Association had 3,000 members and its goal was to democratize the production of beer. It assailed the stranglehold of the leading US beer producers. Their “industrial beer”—disparaged as thin and overcarbonated—was the hot cause of the microbrew movement.

In addition to exacerbating discontent among beer aficionados about the lack of choice and the dearth of fresh, tasteful beer sold at bars, restaurants, and other gathering places, the home brewing movement educated consumers about traditional beers and artisanal techniques. Brewing, frequenting brewpubs, and attending beer festivals became forms of cool mobilization. In 1982, Bert Grant opened the first brewpub (which both brewed and sold beer and served food on its premises), in Yakima, Washington. That same year, the Great American Beer Festival drew about 40 brewers and 700 beer enthusiasts.

The passion to make tasteful beer with traditional artisanal techniques induced more microbrewers and brewpub owners to enter the industry. Their spirit was exemplified by Bob Connor of the Independence Brewing Company, whose billboard read: “Independence—enjoy it while it lasts.” As Anchor Brewing owner Fritz Maytag put it in an interview, “The more breweries there are, the more it will help all of us. We are like bacteria in a bottle. Alone we mean nothing, but if there are a lot of us, we can make a difference.” The number of new microbreweries and brewpubs increased in tandem: microbrews and brewpubs legitimized each other and enhanced each other’s cultural acceptance.

By 1994, close to 500 establishments were part of the $400 million craft beer movement in the United States. Although microbrewers crafted more than two million barrels of beer, their revenues were much lower than those generated by Michelob Light. Microbreweries and brewpubs weren’t about volume: they were an expression of a new identity, one premised on small-scale, authentic, and traditional methods of production, and fresh beer with myriad tastes.
Rebels in opposition: Biotechnology commercialization

In 1972, Germany’s Federal Research Ministry established a national biotechnology laboratory to promote research. By the early 1980s, Germans were applying for more biotechnology patents than Americans were. However, by 1990 German pharmaceutical companies either had plants sitting idle (like Hoechst AG’s $37 million facility in Frankfurt) or had delayed construction of new ones. Meanwhile, 75 percent of German biotechnology investments flowed past German borders, especially to the United States. BASF established a lab in Massachusetts; Bayer and Henkel targeted California. What happened?

For starters, German antibiotech activists made their cause a hot one by depicting biotechnology as a Faustian bargain that risked resurrecting Nazi eugenics and genetic discrimination. This emotional appeal enabled a small group of core activists to recruit a wide range of allies and sympathizers such as workers within pharmaceutical companies, schoolteachers, neighbors of scientists, church groups and leaders, politicians across the political spectrum, and part of the scientific community.

By reducing biotechnology to genetic engineering and connecting it to Nazi eugenics, the antibiotech activists made biotechnology a matter of basic principles and a technology imbued with “incalculable risk,” a term borrowed from the parallel debate about nuclear energy. As early as 1984–85, a parliamentary commission entrusted with writing a report on biotechnology titled it, “Opportunities and Risks of Genetic Technology.” By contrast, the Office of Technology Assessment in the United States released a report titled “Commercial Biotechnology,” which reviewed the economic prospects of the technology and how the federal government could support the industry.

At the same time, activists in Germany fostered cool mobilization. To arouse public concern, they held protests at large physical structures, such as corporate fermentation plants, rather than small university laboratories. Protests and marches often were local exercises, and activists staged dramatic spectacles to garner TV coverage and make the dangers of biotechnology more vivid: headless chickens strutting before demonstrations, disabled protestors holding signs against reproductive genetic screening, and deformed mutant mice in animal-testing cages. Emotion-laden tactics left the pharmaceutical companies reeling because they relied on a strategy of presenting “facts.” As one public relations veteran confessed:

I went to a panel at the nearest high school with a Green member of the state parliament. There were 500 people in attendance and it was packed. I was winning the argument, and suddenly [my opponent] started to scream and cry. So I said to her, “Don’t you think we should stop being so emotional and be more objective about this?” At that point a 50-year-old lady in the audience stood up and said, “Are you only a brain or do you actually have a heart in this issue too?”

The challenges and delaying tactics of activists created uncertainty regarding both the future of regulation and the speed with which companies could bring products to market, effects that had serious implications for likely returns on investment. As one executive noted, “The question often was, ‘Why spend money on this biotech thing, where we may make some money in ten years or not, when we could spend it on a chemical product or a product line extension, where we can make money within two or three years?’” By shaping the terms of this debate, market rebels inhibited biotech commercialization efforts in Germany.
Thinking like an insurgent

Social movements represent a double-edged sword for companies. Capitalizing on preexisting movements can create enormous opportunities. Nike, for example, owes its early success—indeed, its existence—to the running movement powered by Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman and doctor Kenneth Cooper (who pioneered aerobics) to athletes like Frank Shorter and to a network of running clubs that dotted the country.

But social movements also pose threats. The antitobacco movement drew on a coalition of health researchers and attorneys who played a central role in placing restrictions on the market for cigarettes. Similarly, the organic-food movement, which emphasizes an alliance between environmentalists and proponents of locally available foods, has created a formidable challenge for food companies purveying standardized products.

The challenge for managers is to start thinking like insurgents, which for many will require effecting a serious mind-set shift. As the examples below emphasize, executives who are able to do so boost their odds not only of shaping market acceptance of innovative products but also of stimulating radical change, when it is needed, inside their own organizations.
From deliberate cognition to automatic cognition

Many managers rely on deliberate cognition—that is, the ability of the human mind to process and analyze information—and an appeal to reason. By contrast, insurgents realize that audiences rely on automatic cognition, or shortcuts, to make sense of the world. Hence, they use symbols to communicate their point of view. Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn employed this approach when he took over the dispirited company.1 Ghosn initially spent two months walking the halls. He found that while line workers knew how long it took to build a car, they did not know how much it cost to build a car. And he was shocked when he asked Nissan dealers, “Who’s your biggest competitor?” to hear their answer: “The Nissan dealer down the street.”

Such findings convinced Ghosn that far-reaching social and emotional mobilization was necessary to turn Nissan around. The first change he made, therefore, was symbolic: English would be the company’s language. It was a shock to the whole organization, and Ghosn’s way of seizing neutral ground. He wanted to signal that Nissan was a global company—not a French or Japanese one—and to highlight transparency: no interpreters, no translation. Soon all employees received a small dictionary that defined key terms like “target” and “performance.” The point was to make being a global company more than just rhetoric. The introduction of English was the first step in a social movement to restore pride and innovation at Nissan.
From information to emotions

Managers believe in disseminating information. Insurgents realize that emotions of pride and anger are essential to “unfreeze” and move inert organizations forward. One organization that has used emotion to effect change is Gujarat Gas (an affiliate of British Gas), which supplies gas services to a small city in India. The managing director wanted to make the organization into a customer-focused enterprise, but it was a group of activists—young, mid-level managers with a fierce commitment to change—who led the charge. They believed that being responsive to the customer didn't mean doing something to a customer, it meant doing something with customers.

To persuade others, they made employees go through the experience of being a customer. The employees were sent outside the company office and learned when they sought to visit the office that they had to run a series of gauntlets: first, the sentry at the gate who interrogated them and made them wait; then several clerks delayed things. Who played the role of the sentry and clerks? Customers! Following the role play, employees and customers came together in a large room, and all 400 narrated their experiences. Articulating these experiences amplified the moral shock felt by employees—the shock of self-recognition.
From one-way to two-way communication

Many managers prefer one-way communication; thus, they organize road shows and town hall meetings in which they unveil PowerPoint presentations. Insurgents rely on two-way communication. They reverse the structure of the town hall; the audience asks questions and becomes engaged. Managers can try this online through “jams,” or giant conversations. IBM has had several online jams featuring thousands of employees. In the Values Jam, 320,000 employees weighed in over a 72-hour period. The values that emerged—dedication to clients, innovation that matters, and trust—gained currency because they were crafted through mass mobilization, rather than being chosen and transmitted by executives.
From roll-out to WUNC

Most managers are concerned with rolling out a change and preoccupied with overcoming resistance to it. Insurgents go where there is energy and are concerned with drawing in people. By getting their audiences to do things collectively, insurgents sustain emotion and foster worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC—a term coined by Charles Tilly to describe the source of strength for social movements). Feelings of worthiness and unity, along with large numbers of committed members willing to take collective risks, are essential if a movement is to have impact.

Consider PSS World Medical, a company that provides medical supplies to physician practices through its network of drivers and warehouses.2 It believes in open-book management and recognizes that employees “fire” bosses by disengaging emotionally from the business. When it acquired a company called Taylor Medical in Dallas, Texas, the PSS World Medical manager in charge of integration, Gary Corliss, asked Taylor employees to join him for an all-hands meeting to discuss PSS values. The first question he asked employees was, “Tell me everything you hate here.” As he suspected, they pointed to cameras that the Taylor warehouse manager had installed to monitor employees and deter theft. Corliss, who had walked into the meeting with a baseball bat, smashed the camera, and invited others to do the same (with a blanket to protect them from shards of glass). Employees then destroyed the cameras. This cathartic act enabled them to express pent-up emotions and have a conversation about cultural change. Within six months, turnover—which had been a problem—fell to zero.

Market rebels aren’t Molotov cocktail–throwing World Trade Organization (WTO) opponents. They are groups of individuals who together shape markets through hot causes, which arouse emotions, and through cool mobilization, which allows participants to realize collective identities. Executives that understand the roles and practices of market rebels are more likely to be successful innovation leaders.
About the Author

Hayagreeva Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. This article is adapted from his book Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Reprinted from Clay Shirky. Superbly incisive and insightful article on publishing models post-internet. the article talks about journalism and newspapers, but has relevance for all Publishers. An important, must read piece for anyone in the media or publishing business.

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

* * *

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

* * *

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

* * *

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.

For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

* * *

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

From the Scholarly Kitchen

Publishers allow authors more freedom to use their articles than authors currently believe, a recent study notes.

The report, Journal authors’ rights: perception and reality, was written by publishing veteran, Sally Morris, for the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC).

For both the submitted and accepted version of the manuscript, authors routinely underestimated what their publisher agreements allowed them to do. Moreover, the rights granted by publishers generally exceed authors’ wishes.

On the other hand, authors tend to overestimate what they can do with the published version of their article when it comes to self-archiving. Few publishers allow final PDF versions to be made publicly available through subject or institutional repositories, although more than half of authors believed that their agreements allowed them this right.

The strength in this report is not the introduction of new data — there have been several, well-conducted author and publisher surveys, which Morris amply summarizes in her report — but her analysis and interpretation. Morris focuses on why there is a systemic disjoint between what publishers offer and what authors believe they can do.

Finding a solution to this problem is clearly her purpose.

She writes:

Publishers need to ask themselves why it is that authors have such an inaccurate understanding of their copyright policies, particularly with regard to self-archiving [...] Clearly publishers have failed to get across the positive message about those policies which, contrary to authors’ and others’ belief, do meet (or even exceed) their wishes.

Morris believes that much of the misunderstanding about self-archiving can be explained by confusion over the term ‘postprint.’ Indeed, she doesn’t hold back leveling some of this blame on the RoMEO database and on open access advocates such as Stevan Harnad and Peter Suber, who all equate ‘postprint’ with the final draft of a manuscript and not the published version of an article.

Responding to the report, Stevan Harnad defends his use of the terminology:

the preprint/postprint distinction is perfectly coherent: a preprint is any draft preceding the author’s final, accepted, refereed version, and a postprint is any draft from the author’s final, accepted refereed version onward (including the publisher’s PDF).

This definition may be coherent for Harnad, but it seems to confuse more than clarify.

NISO’s proposal for Journal Article Versions uses less ambiguous terminology such as Author’s Original, Accepted Manuscript, and Version of Record. Morris believes that widespread adoption of standardized terms will avoid future confusion. It would also reaffirm that publishers are adding value at each stage of publication. Morris concludes,

Although a few academics and librarians may want to see the demise of established journals and their publishers, most do not; a clear explanation of why this could happen, if a critical mass of their value-added contents were freely available, needs to be reiterated at every opportunity.

Good EMF piece

The Problem

For years we have developed our professional skills into disciplines that fit nicely into a variety of silos: marketing, finance, HR, operations, purchasing, etc. Our organizations and universities have developed world-class experts in each of those disciplines. As long as the company was healthy, those disciplines could exist side by side and everyone went about his or her happy business.

But then the world economic order changed and a lot of specialists lost their jobs to competing entities and technological advancements. Transactional work was digitized and outsourced. Sales people were replaced by online marketing and re-supply software. Payroll and benefits administration were outsourced to other companies across the street, across the country and across the oceans. R&D centres were established in India, China and other nations in order to tap into those burgeoning economies and talent.

As a result of this downsizing of individual and local silos of expertise, the remaining employees had to do more work in areas unrelated to their professional discipline. Suddenly, the HR managers and other department executives found themselves in a decision making position in which they did not have the standard training, background, or experience.

“Breaking out of individual silos of expertise and cross-training in other functional areas is a key step to improved performance, opportunity and job security.”

As competition for qualified employees increased, organizations and government employers began clamouring for people who could think across functional lines and who possessed a sharp knowledge of multiple disciplines. They began to ask for graduates and experienced people who possessed world class business skills first and who also possessed an expertise in one or more of the subordinate functions. In one example, corporate recruiters at a major New York research university routinely ask the candidates to describe how they would help the company and its clients solve complex problems in multi-disciplinary teams and in multi-cultural settings.

CEOs began asking their subordinate leaders to revise their work strategies so that their work more directly contributed to the performance metrics of the organization. In the HR field, in addition to their traditional employee focus, executives began to consider the needs of the investors in the company and the customers who bought their products or services and kept the company in business. This is a huge departure from the norm. Investor relations used to be confined to the Finance and executive departments. Customer relations issues used to be confined to the customer service departments. Not any more.
The Solution

As a result, training programmes began to proliferate as non-financial people began to see the need to understand how corporate finance works and to relate their work directly to the ability of their employer to stay in and grow the business. Concurrently, employees in other functional disciplines such as marketing and procurement began to develop expertise in additional business skills that improved the value of their own work. In a local bank in New York, for example, branch managers are not selected for branch banking duties until they have completed a series of assignments in several departments such as trust, human resources, loan operations and finance.

Organizations began to realize the need for professional development beyond the normal scope of responsibilities. Business literacy has become a focus of strategic thinking. Breaking out of individual silos of expertise and cross-training in other functional areas is a key step to improved performance, opportunity and job security.


1. Make business literacy of all your employees a priority. Teach your employees about your business:
1. how does your company make money;
2. who are your customers and why do they buy from you;
3. why do they buy from your competitors; and
4. what pressures are your customers facing and how can you help them address their needs.

2. Teach your employees to develop their competitive intelligence analysis skills:
1. define and understand your firm’s industry;
2. identify the critical elements affecting your industry. In the automobile industry, for example, critical elements may include gas prices, environmental requirements, design features, alternate forms of transportation available, and credit accessibility; and
3. recognize and acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and how they are responding to the critical elements that they have defined.

3. Require every functional leader to conduct a S.W.O.T. analysis of their department:
1. what are the Strengths of my department vs. the Strengths of my competitors in the same field;
2. what are the Weaknesses of my department vs. my competitors;
3. what are the Opportunities that we can exploit to improve our competitive advantage and positively impact our financial condition; and
4. what are the Threats affecting not only my company, but the industry as a whole, e.g. energy costs, political / legal requirements, credit, job security, etc.

4. Examine your business world from alternate perspectives. Identify the commonality of the problems and seek out the best solutions from multiple sources. For example, Kodak Corporation, a manufacturer of cameras and photo equipment examined the distribution processes of L.L. Bean, a mail-order catalogue company, to solve a distribution problem. Sears once examined NASCAR processes to help them reduce time on automobile services. Just because you work for an airline doesn’t mean that you are restricted to the airline industry for possible solutions. When you describe your situation, you will be amazed at how many people have similar problems in totally non-related businesses.

5. Share best practices with everyone. Lunchtime programmes can be good opportunities to share information and present new concepts for discussion. Make a game of it. Teach your people the fundamentals of your business and then ask them for their recommendations on how to improve the condition of the company. The more you endow your employees with upgraded skills and abilities, the more passionate they will become about their work and creating opportunities for advancement and enhanced job security.