Uncertainty is Opportunity at Yale Publishing Course

Live with uncertainty--uncertainty is opportunity. So begins the first full day of the Yale Publishing Course, and the message--from Paul Saffo, futurist and Managing Director of Foresight, Discern Analytics, could hardly be more welcome. In this time of uncertainty, change, and sometimes despair, Saffo tells us that this is a better time to be in publishing than any time in history. With the introduction of the iPad comes a foundational shift in computing, a profound shift in how deeply machines are in our lives, and his advice to our group is to ride that wave.

The buzz about how to ride the wave began to reverberate through the group as members look to their own creative processes to seize the opportunties and embrace the media revolution. Sappho reminds us that the process is driven by exponential dynamics, wherein change continues to accelerate year by year. As publishers we can't slow down or stop; we have to keep moving. The changes are leaving traditional publishing a pile of rubble, but if we can recombine the pieces we'll build a basis for future success. And to do that, we need to be heat seekers for innovation, for technology, for the leading edge of change. And as part of that, we need to watch for the things that don't seem to fit.

Growth is the process of creative destruction, and this idea was picked up by Richard Foster of Yale School of Management. There are old established parts of our businesses that are holding us back; and getting rid of those parts is much more difficult than creating anything new. Foster challenges us to face and overcome the affliction of aging businesses, performance fade.

How can we do that? A start is a focus on the periphery, to which we are led by divergent thinking. our competition is not coming so much from the core--it is coming from the aggregated periphery. If we can Identify who is there, what they are doing, and understand their economics, we can begin to grow and innovate.

What is the periphery of publishing? Today it's the Cloud. We as publishers need to be aware that the move away from mainframes and client servers to the Cloud is our future.

In the buzz following the sessions, it became evident that many participants are beginning or along the road the shifts described; participants expressed their sense that their sometimes-inchoate ideas and directions are receiving confirmation and ideas for additional direction over the course of the day.

Linda Ruth is a founding member of Exceptional Women in Publishing (www.ewip.org); as a participant in the Yale Publishing Course (http://publishing-course.yale.edu/) she is providing daily blog updates.