Conde Nast & McKinsey on the New Media rack

If it’s just another standard business strategy/efficiencies (read: firing) exercise then I’m sure it’ll deliver limited value and won't effect the long-term future (having seen various similar exercises before), as per your sum-up Alan.

If, however, it’s about repurposing/restructuring the organisation so that it’s well equipped to build and develop products that’ll make them competitive, allowing them to diversify their business model and revenue streams, then that’ll be the big win (obviously in parallel with identifying the markets, opportunities and approaches that are going to be most fruitful for them).

Far too often in these exercises media companies just tweak what they do (i.e. which markets and products) based around the same old business model (i.e. selling ads around content, or variants on that theme; obviously the latest meme is around just charging for what is currently free), and maintaining the same monolithic and silo’d organisational structure; and/or they just slash at the existing inefficient structure which reduces costs but doesn’t achieve anything else. They really need to understand that in order to be competitive, innovative and nimble they need a new structure within their businesses (print/digital/integrated/whatever), with small, well-resourced cross-functional teams (including content/editorial!; and led by somebody who knows the target market well), who have a dedicated focus on a given space, have full ownership and accountability, and have the remit to create a suite of services, offerings and products that will allow the business to fully engage with the opportunity. The opposite is the current norm, with fragmented ownership and accountability, infighting across functions, poor organisational alignment/integration generally (particularly with tech), and therefore an inability to really focus, innovate and execute (not saying that CN is like this specifically - these are general characteristics).

So looking forward to seeing if CN and McKinsey can do something useful here, rather than churning out the normal tweaks and amends to the model, along with associated cost-savings.