I'm still doing the two-hour drive three days a week so I've been exploring a few other podcasts to check whether
the spoken written word is out there yet, and whether current media providers are typically seeing the podcast opportunity as a chance to take radio formats online.
It isn't. They are.

Among the toe curling badness of most professional podcasting, the Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast is a nice simple idea. It's not much more than a chance for authors of recent business books to talk about their ideas and it's none the worse for that. As you'd expect, some of it is faddish (charismatic outsiders are out, hardworking insiders are in) and MBArassiingly obvious (Hold the front page: you need to be able to think of things in more than one way to succeed), but there's some great stuff too.

One interview that particualy grabbed me was with Chris Zook. He's just produced a book called Unstoppable: Finding Hidden Assets to Renew the Core and Fuel Profitable Growth. Zook heads Bain's Global Strategy Practice and his high experience, low bullshit approach makes the book eminently readable. Zook has certainly followed his own prescription having written first a book about profiting from the core (his own core idea), then a book about expanding it (an expansion of his core idea) and now a book about how to find something within your core to allow you to continue to grow (a renewal of his core idea). He can at least claim to be walking the walk. For newspaper managers who would value a coherent framework for thinking about our current business disruption it's the best book you'll read this year. Not entirely cheery, but very very good.

"It is a lot easier to win in poker," says Zook in the intro,  "if you know you already hold a few aces than if you are relying on the dealer for a whole new set of cards." This is potentially a classic bit of business book bullshit. Sounds great, definitely true, but not necessarily a very good metaphor for anything. But he gets a pass on this one, because it's a great metaphor for the newspaper industry's response to the internet disruption of the past 10 years. We have looked at the smiles on the faces of internet entrepreneurs around our poker table and are being conned into folding a perfectly good hand without even considering the possibility that they are bluffing or that we might have the skills to play this hand to victory.

Zook also gets a pass because he goes on to back up what he says with a lengthy list of examples and statistics that support his idea that the most effective way to reinvent a company is by finding something valuable that already exists within it. Zook is also honest enough to emphasise how difficult this actually is.

Zook knows that newspapers are a good example of a business that needs reinventing and identifies the New York Times as being at the stage where it needs to redefine its business but frustratingly he doesn't use newspaper examples in the rest of the book. Which means you have to either think it out for yourself (exhausting) or hire Bain to do it for you (expensive).  So spotting a gap, here is my cheap and easy way to use Zook's framework to think about the newspaper business.

His basic finding, that moving from unsustainable to (temporarily) unstoppable occurs more often in companies who use assets they already have at hand rather than those who attempt to make great leaps forward into new technology, echoes many of the ideas you will have found on Inksniffer. 

Zook divides hidden assets into three categories: undervalued business platforms, untapped customer insights, and underutilized capabilities. Sometimes they are difficult to distinguish, but here's a few ideas that came to my mind.

1. Undervalued business platforms. The distribution network of local newspapers and the connectivity we have to consumers is a massive hidden asset that we should be developing and expanding, not only to allow us to innovate in our core product but as a profit center in its own right. Timely early delivery of products to people's homes is a potentially huge new business for us and yet far from developing it and getting control of it we have contracted it out to small independent operators to save some money. Few businesses beyond USPS have our ability to get goods on a daily basis into people's hands. Unlocking the value of our distribution network is, as I've said before, the key to our future survival. Taking this element of our business as a serious potential future core could transform us.

Another undervalued platform is weekend inserts. Journalists hate to think of people buying newspapers for coupons and the supermarket's weekly adverts. But it seems to be an important driver of readers and advertisers here in the US, so logically newspapers should embrace it. Yet the inserts are delivered in a big ugly misshapen pile that tips all over the floor when you pick up the paper. Why is the  joy of shopping and bargain hunting ignored editorially and presented so badly if both readers and advertisers see it as part of a newspaper's role? Why can't we have a shopping section that brings all this stuff together, is engaging editorially and (maybe over time) lets us get this stuff bound in to the section or printed ROP so it ceases to irritate those who don't want it? The delivery of bargains to our readers ought to be executed better than this.

2. Untapped customer insights. We have two sets of customers. Our business starts with attracting readers and our readers allow us to sell their attention to advertisers. So our insights should probably start with readers. Metro had an untapped customer insight. "People might read a paper if you could get it into their hands at a time when they had nothing else to do at no cost to them and packaged in a way they could easily consume in that short space of time." You could argue that newspapers' potential to produce spoken versions of their titles (see my last post) and get them to people on their phone/MP3 players in a skippable format resembling an aural newspaper might be a similar insight: "Readers might be prepared to consume newspapers and pay for them if they didn't have to carry them around, didn't have to physically buy them every day, could listen rather than read and skip past stories they found uninteresting".

But our insights shouldn't end with readers. Currently we asssume that we sell the attention of all our readers to all our advertisers and our segmenting of them is largely based on what they sell rather than which of our readers buy what. We claim that to be inevitable but that's a big lazy lie. The most egregious example of this is job adverts. Jobseekers are not one segment, seeking any job on every page. Yet in most US papers I've seen all the job adverts appear together in one big messy illegible smudge on the page with minimal help as to which kinds of jobs might be interesting to me. I wouldn't go there if I wasn't looking for a job so we offer employers only access to our unemployed readers. Who make up a fractin of the readers our advertisers actually want to talk to.

I'm not surprised this segment is disappearing from US newspapers. If I'm a health worker why can't you give me a section to read that speaks to health workers and put ads for new relevant jobs in there. Then I might see them when I'm not actually looking for a new job - ie I might be the sort of candidate an advertiser really wants to find. The internet cannot compete in giving advertisers access to people who already have jobs and aren't looking. Yet our ability to draw in readers with editorial content means that we can own them. But criminally in the US we don't and hence the appeal of Craigslist and online job sites. They are rubbish, but we're no better. If you see active jobseekers as the market for job ads rather than all professionals in that field then you are doomed.

How much do we really know about the process by which our readers buy, say, a car or a home? Or how they choose a retailer? What part of the process are we? And for which groups? How does that affect who we sell to and the price we charge? If we are selling space on a page instead of the right attention of the right people, we are not actually selling what the customer actually wants to buy, we're just selling a proxy for it. In those circumstances we are obviously vulnerable to competitors selling a better proxy or something closer to what the customer actually wants to buy ie response. Can we carry on selling penetration as a proxy for response in these circumstances. Probably not.

Zook calls it segment blindness. We've seen our customers and their needs the same way for so long that we can't imagine selling what we sell any differently from how we sell it now until it's too late and someone else has stolen them from us.


3. Underutilized capabilities. This is a whole exercise on its own. What are the capabilities that a newspaper has that makes it a superior medium for readers and advertisers? We have become so obsessed with the advantages of online and the possibility of migrating our revenue there that we've belittled our own medium in the eyes of our customers. But print is a great, if underinnovated medium. What are we good at? Portable, easily searchable, low-cost, throwaway information? The ability to select, order and present information in a way that readers trust? The ability to take an advertising message into a high proportion of homes within a given geography? Distribution? Zook contends that most managers in most businesses have surprisngly poor answers to these questions and need better ones. We are no exception.

Sadly Zook's excellent work is not yet available as an audiobook but maybe Harvard Business School Press will find inspiration in Zook's work and soon publish their titles in audio versions at the same time as in print. Of all the people to exploit a hidden asset, the publishers of Chris Zook's books should be first in the queue.