5 Steps to Internet Innovation?

I was please that it was working. I could see how this might be regarded as a bit far outside the remit of "Managing Digital Projects". But as I mentioned that the key assumption that the newspapers had been hanging onto - that they could make money from selling content - had been pretty comprehensively blown out of the water. She started shaking her head and then angrily asked -
"But then how ARE we going to make money?"
"I dunno, maybe you aren't. Maybe somebody else who's got a business model that works on the internet is going to ruin you."
"But that's not fair!"
"No, maybe not, but that doesn't stop it being true."
She kept shaking her head. But finally she said.
"Yeah, you're right. You know, you should tell my boss this. I think he needs to do this course". She was all limp and defeated. [depression]

She didn't actually work in the newspaper industry but she was clever enough to see how the internet was going to affect how she made her living just as radically. She was in an industry that had once been the epitome of respectability and was now overrun with spammers and charlatans.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to people who work in the publishing industry whilst teaching my course "Managing Digital Projects." The format of the course was a bit unusual: the first two days of the three-day course are separated from the last day by about 6 weeks. The idea is that people who attend the course can go away and try out some of techniques that I've suggested and report back.

The structure also has another benefit. It gives me a chance at the end of the two days to ask the course delegates if there was anything that they wanted me to include in the last day, if there was anything that I hadn't covered.

One question that someone asked me in the first 2 days was "What's the difference between a digital project and a digital product?"

I thought a lot about what the difference was between a digital product and a digital project. I realised that there was a kind of technical issue around how to create e-books if all you have is the hard copy. Lots of stuff to do with arranging for people to do double keying in the Phillipines and something I know absolutely nothing about. But I also suspected that hidden inside this question was a kind of assumption about what a digital project is - that it's just an opportunity to sell the same kinds of things that you used to sell offline - products, on-line.

And this lead me to think about about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief (sorry, this is how my mind works).

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

There's quite a lot of criticism of Kübler-Ross's account as a description of grief, first of all because most people who are grieving don't seem to be denying anything. But it strikes me as a brilliant and useful model for lots of other situations where somebody is being told something that they don't want to hear. And this interests me partly because, as part of the MDP course, I teach how to deal with difficult conversations, and partly because:

as a consultant and trainer that's exactly what I spend most of my time doing: trying to tell people things they don't want to hear.

I realised that people who are asking me to talk about what a digital product is are actually in denial. The web is going to bring about a massive wave of change in their world. And they don't want to know about it. In the course, I used this marvellous blog post by Clay Shirky about the terrible state of the newspaper industry to illustrate just how powerful and destructive denial can be. The newspapers have known that the web is going to rock their world for at least ten years.

And their main response has been denial.

To be honest, I was a little worried about this section, even though I put it in the "and finally" slot at the end of the day. Even for me, it felt a little bit off beam, but:

I don't think I could have got a better response.