Success in the face of layoffs

I had the somber duty this week of informing two very talented and very respected employees they were being laid off. I won’t use evasive terms such as downsized, eliminated, rightsized or realigned. This was 2 people being laid off – it is a slack-jawed approach to call it anything else. While I am still relatively new to my role as the Director of Technology at Gazette Communications, it is not the first time I have had to let somebody go and not the first time I’ve had to let someone go who was not a performance or conduct problem (those types, what I call knuckle-head firings, are easy).
Since laying off those employees, I have spoken with each and every of my department staff. They deserved to hear it from me that I made and executed the decision. We did not discuss the specifics of decision nor the specifics the actual layoff conversations, but I did let them know that it was necessary in order to get our workforce down to the right financial level. With the knowledge it could be perceived as cold and calculating, I wanted to ensure they knew I owned that decision to the fullest extent. At the same time, I think they all walked away knowing the layoffs were something from which I garnered no joy, no amusement and certainly no personal gain.
Now we move on. That’s what we have to do or we risk becoming stagnat and irrelevant…thus easily unemployed. So we move on, but it is vastly easier said than accomplished. My team is smarting from this week and they would be right in harboring feeling of uneasiness about their job security. The cold, grim reality is there never really is any job worth doing that is 100% secure. I live large chunks of life often through the lenses of analogies.  During the baseball post-season, it is common to see batters shorten up their stroke and become more selective in their actions, almost to the point of paralysis sometimes. Reggie Jackson was Mr. October because he relished the post-season pressure and actually turned it up a few notches in those situations. If anything, he took a grander approach to his work, knowing he would be a grand success or grand failure. He was a stellar performer all year, so it is hardly amazing he was then able to be bold in the playoffs and succeed. I think he thrived off the knowledge that while others around him were shortening their stroke and being careful, he had an opportunity to take command of the situation by being bold and aggressive.
Silly analogy? Not applicable? Maybe a little insulting given the layoffs? I would disagree with those conclusions. We need to continue to act, to question, to explore, to play, to experiment, to learn, to network, to implement with speed, to listen and to realize that fortune really does favor the bold.

Retreading the print edition

It’s been a busy week+ since my last post and it has born some interesting fruit. What began as a reader question about ebook availability of our print edition blossomed quickly into a back-office science experiment and then on to a viable technology solution with revenue potential. That’s the short version…the longer follows.
Based on a reader inquiry about being able to subscribe to The Gazette in ebook format, I kicked off what I thought would just be some personal research into the various ebook file formats, open source tools and other technology ins and outs. What I quickly realized was a potential revenue stream was sitting almost in our collective laps and we needed to move and move now. To explain the technology process I have put together, I will highlight each step/status and the discovered action at each step/status to move forward.
Starting at the far end of our pagination process, our print edition resides as a collection of Adobe pdf files (one for each actual page in the paper). ebook format is, at least for papers, just one big file. The easy solution was to utilize existing investments in Adobe Acrobat (or we could use any number of freeware pdf programs) to merge them all into one big pdf file (usually weighing in at a hefty 28-30 MB per weekday edition). Part of this merge is a manual reordering of the files since our file naming conventions, while close to being alphabetically correct, does have a few quirks that requires manual intervention. Easily enough – just rearrange in Adobe as needed before merging.
The next hurdle was converting this file into an ebook format. Which one? There are, well, more than a couple choices…some highly proprietary, some nearly consumable by all ebook readers and most other platforms with open source client tools. I settled on the .prc format since it is readily ingested into the Kindle, Sony readers, and Mobipocket clients for laptops/desktops, iPhones, Blackberries and even Windows Mobile. I utilized the MobiPocket Creator software to import the large pdf and generate a directory of an xml-based html file and a large number of jpg files. That’s not the solution, as it then has to be through a “build” process (yes, sort of along the lines of a compiler) to generate a single file in the .prc format (which has averaged between 5.5 and 6MB for the daily edition). Sort of an electronic, low-cal version of the paper, huh?
As you can notice from the above, this process does rely on some human button pushing and brain power, but not much. I’ve personally been able to neck it down to just over 5 minutes. We have engineered a process that, while not automated, requires zero investment in infrastructure and tools, is repeatable on a daily basis for a time investment of less than 10 minutes and thus has, in a mathematical sense, an infinite ROI (discounting labor time, that is). Pretty sweet! It’s awfully rare to uncover such a gift.
The real question to all this is how widespread it will become. For a nominal price, many of these ebook users may likely jump at the chance to have all the content of their print edition paper on their reader device. For the record, The Gazette’s prototype ebook format includes all content (text, pictures AND ads)…not the case with some ebook papers out there. Sorry-tooting our own horn is bad form. I think the ever-increasing breadth and depth of customized content delivery (blogs, RSS, etc) will eventually render even the most fetching of ebook paper offerings boring, predictable and unworthy of a minimal subscription investment. When? Ah, great question and I would hazard a prognostication of not within 2-3 years. So, put that in economic figures in your mind for a second. Just imagine 500 readers (Kindle, Plastic Logic, Sony, Mobipocket, etc.) subscribing to The Gazette for the next 12 months at, for ease of round math, $5 a month (a bargain considering the weekday price is $.75 and most major papers are charging $9+ for their ebook version). That’s $30,000. Again, keep in mind our internal investment is about 10 minutes a day. Depending on the subscription vehicle, much of that $30K is profit. Assume a guess of a 10% margin to the subscription clearing house: we end up with $27K of NET PROFIT per year for an investment of just over 1 hour per week. I know I have probably grossly over-generalized some of the business case stuff (sorry…IT geek here). Just imagine if the ebook world really takes hold and the 500 figure used in this example is way, WAY low.
I thought I would share with some thoughts on the ebook world, especially considering business forecast for absolute explosions in the Kindle and Plastic Logic reader markets over the next 18 months (some sources put it at a $1B market). First, those people are going to need something to read. Books are great and the readers (meaning the device) will provide people a wonderfully new means of establishing a library. Don’t be shocked – people used to have HUGE collections of records…now they have all their music in digital format. Why not the same with books?

For those convinced the print edition paper was officially old, tired and unable to compete in a digital world, you might take notice of the new tread being put on that tire.

Connection: a personal family example

Our family has a wonderful event this weekend. My parents celebrated 50 years of marriage (yes, I’m bragging a bit, but it is a life event that is happening less and less). We held a fairly intimate 4 hour celebration dinner (for 24!) at the Lighthouse, laughing, recounting stories, and generally enjoying everyone’s company. My parents had a good time, so we have chalked it up as a success.

Being relatively typical Iowans, my parents were hardly looking for much of a fuss to made over this. They are such typical under-stated people. Being typical non-compliant children, however, we were certainly not going to let their desire for “no fuss” stop us. The linked picture above (digital screen scrape from the Gazette e-Edition) is the reason for this post. It was the lone public recognition of the event and I could not have been more astounded by the number and variety of congratulations that poured in to my parents, including several dozen phone calls, multiple flower arrangements and a stack of cards over 6″ inches high (minus the envelopes). I’m terribly biased in saying my parents are great folks, but the response generated by a single Milestones entry was staggering.

I have wander a bit, so let me focus on the “so what” point of this. Connecting with the community is the point. It was not hard-hitting political news, it was not a scandal, and it was not a championship trophy – just two people who love each other and have stuck together through thick and thin. Granted the Gazette was not initiator of the announcement, they didn’t host the dinner, etc. – that’s not the point and if you were thinking along those lines, you are missing the concept. The Milestones section is not a new invention, but it clearly demonstrates the incredible reach a small piece of content can have in a short period of time. The Gazette served only as a conduit for the information, but it was an incredibly vital role. We could have sent letters or announcements, we could have made phone calls, but we certainly would not have achieved the breadth of reach accomplished with the Milestone announcement. My parents heard from people that they hadn’t seen or heard from for years (meaning we wouldn’t have known where to send a letter or what phone number to call). If you think that kind of result isn’t critical to achieving a Complete Community Connection, you are sadly and deeply mistaken.

As we continue our institutional change of mindset, this will definitely resonate in my mind. The Gazette played a vital, albeit quiet, role in facilitating a critical action: a publicly available announcement that allowed interested readers to send congratulatory sentiments. In the end, my parents were very touched and a bit surprised at the response. There was a breadth of connection made in this instance that could not be replicated through other means. Before someone misinterprets this post as an implication that only a printed Milestones section is capable of these results, I will note several of the well-wishers specifically mentioned the seeing it in the e-Edition.

Core compentencies

This weekend provided a neatly packaged scenario of exactly why an organization must understand those things that are core competencies and control those capabilities. This is not a sly way to start talking about horribly bad officiating and how the refs completely blew the fumble call on Kurt Warner at the end of the Super Bowl. I digress…

The web site for the city of Cedar Rapids was hacked this weekend. In the process of working a comment on Steve Buttry’s blog, I wanted to pass along a link for contacting our local elected public servants. What I found was every non-document page below the main page had been replaced with a tagged page from a hack. I saved a screen capture of it on my Facebook wall. This kind of stuff happens at times, so I thought it would be good to extend a professional courtesy to the city’s IT staff and make sure they knew of the hack. After multiple numbers and repeatedly ending up talking to an out-sourced message taking service who was either unable of unwilling to put me in contact with an on-call member of the city IT staff, I decided it was Sunday, I had other things to do and they could discover their own problem. I did take time to fire off some ticklers to the Gazette and KCRG about the hack and went about my day. In the end, I have no idea when they were actually alerted to the problem or by whom, but the problem existed for at least 24 hours.
There are some lessons from this real-life scenario. Why invest in an after-hours/weekends/holidays message service that only takes messages for delivery to the person on the next business day? From the capabilities I saw demonstrated, an answering machine from WalMart would fully replace the message service. Please give that one a couple seconds to sink in: the message center folks told me all they could do is take the message and make sure it was waiting for the IT folks first thing on Monday. See, just like an answering machine. Let’s move on to a bit of forensics. I was curious as to the nature of the hack and did some quick research based on the tag page left behind by the hackers. 2006. That was the year this attack was first documented on the internet. Some of the reports even indicated the vulnerabilities exploited in the attacks were old operating systems (e.g. NT) and old versions of IIS. I sure hope our city IT infrastructure isn’t running anything on NT! NT is basically a free range chicken on the IT prairie. Microsoft doesn’t even support it anymore and it is not subject to patches or hot fixes. In short, NT is the figurative red badge of courage for those who like to gamble with their organizations network security.
Here’s the summary for those aren’t already bored of hearing something that is common-sense for 99% of IT professionals:
- If you consider customer service a core competency, don’t out-source it to a note taker. If all you need are phone messages on the next business day, buy an answering machine.
- If you consider network and data security a core competency, don’t rely on old, tired and unsupported technologies.