Podcast: Winners of digital media disruption

How can media businesses best respond to the digital disruption? What are the common features of successful companies, and how […]

How can media businesses best respond to the digital disruption? What are the common features of successful companies, and how can professionals maneuver between being able both to experiment, but also saying no to distractions? And is it worthwhile taking up the fight against the global, technology companies?

In the third episode of Tinius Talks, Kjersti Løken Stavrum, the CEO of the Tinius Trust, talks to Morten T. Hansen, professor at University of California at Berkeley, and Jon Gunnar Pedersen, partner in Arctic Securities, about the principle of focusing and formulas for increased competitiveness in a digital world.

Listen to the episode “Winners of digital media disruption” below or find Tinius Talks in your favorite podcast application, for instance iTunes, Spotify or SoundCloud.

In the episode, Morten T. Hansen describes how media businesses can excel in a digital age. In his latest book “Great at Work” he dived deep into a survey among 5000 people to try to figure out who are the most successful and what are their common features. One of the really important ones is the ability to focus.

– You would think that when things are changing that fast, you ought to be launching lots of new initiatives. But we found the opposite; that the winners typically are extremely good at focusing. So, the key success factor is that you need to decide as a leadership group; where do you want to focus? You can’t be everything to everybody, says Morten Hansen.

The tendency not to focus, as well as the urge to focus, corresponds well with the panels experience from media businesses.

– A very normal tendency for risk-avert managers would be to seek many alternative solutions. You want to have a back-up solution, a plan B, a plan C, a plan D. So, when you think about the limited amount of time available to managers, it’s easy to see that when they also have to plan for a number of alternatives a lot of management resources are wasted on things you’d rather not peruse, confirms Jon Gunnar Pedersen.

Morten T. Hansen’s new study provides two pieces of advice. First, do less then obsess. People who choose just a few key priorities greatly out-perform those who pursue a wide range of priorities. Secondly, redesign for value. Instead of sticking to old values and metrics, you should ask; “what new value can I create in my job, and what new metric can I deploy to track progress against value creation?”.

Read more about his findings and advices here.