Business Week and the Price of Timidity

Today is the end of an era, the sale of Business Week to Bloomberg, at a value so low that would have been impossible to contemplate when I was on the management team there in the early-mid 90's. What a difference 15 years could have made.

Back then, new media was new and, yes, ancillary; a few of us had the privilege of moving into roles dedicated to early experimentation with online media. For us, that meant being the skunkworks team responsible for launching BusinessWeek Online on AOL before that online service had its first million members; and then, planning the launch on the Web. We got it done on the cheap, subsidized by AOL itself which needed some big brands to grow its own business. Sometime between AOL and the Internet launch, I realized that the oportunity for further innovation in that culture over the next few years would be slow. So in '96 I went to a downtown push technology start-up (which my kids at the time referred to as iConfusion, but it really had another name!) The start-up had its own set of unique and memorable challenges; eight months there was a roller coaster ride that 10 years at McGraw Hill would never have matched. But it was exhilirating. At least the start-up's mistakes were exuberant failures of execution, rather than failures to try to see and catch the future.

The time for media companies to support experimentation, to learn, and set the stage for today's challenges was back then; ad revenues were high, cash flow was good, there was no immediate threat to the status quo. Andthat was precisely why top management kept the blinders on. It's only now -- with the industry in crisis mode and no rational excuses left -- that 'traditional' media businesses are finally serious about the change mantra.

As today's headlines show, timidity has its price.