An email popped into my inbox this morning that got my attention because of three intersecting connections. First, it was from my favoured news source the Economist. Second, it featured my wife Rachel's former colleague (and our neighbor) Michael Mankins at Marakon Associates. And third, it was on a topic near and dear to my heart - the gap between strategy and execution. One of my professors at Stanford, Jeffrey Pfeffer, has written cogently on this issue in his book "The Knowing-Doing Gap".
So I read through the email and saw that I was being invited to "to attend an audio webcast on turning great plans into great performance" Eager to hear the latest empirical findings on this topic my first question was "when is this?". Strangely, the email was devoid of time/date information. Frustrated (reminded me of the annoying email evites which don't show the time/date until you click through), I clicked on the registration button hoping to find out more. I went through the registration process and then another email popped into my inbox with links to the ARCHIVED webcast and an article. I felt fooled - invited to a great party AFTER the event.
So I went back to the original email, thinking I had misinterpreted the word "webcast" which I had always taken to mean a live audio or video broadcast on the web. After a quick reference check on Wikipedia, I have to confess it can also mean "archived" so maybe it was my mistake and not the Economist's who are normally so precise in their use of language. Something was still nagging me though, so I re-read the original email and saw the words " get ready", "online forum", "register" and "exclusive event" which have no meaning for an archived webcast, only for a live webcast. Clearly the Economist had screwed up their communication.
So this taught me three lessons
1. Information clutter is so high that even when an event that is so clearly targetted at me (3 connections), it fails to reach me in a timely manner. So much for the promise of personalization?
2. Language to cope with the plethora of new media consumption patterns is messy, ambiguous and evolving. Don't take for granted that new terms mean the same thing to different people.
3. Traditional news companies are a long way off figuring out how to build and manage their relationships with their readers given the explosion of formats, patterns and modes of consumption. The problem is getting harder faster than the solutions are addressing the problem.
Rant of the day over. Feel better now.
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