If You're Hiring A 'Head Of Digital Innovation' You're Doing It Wrong
from the sorry-bloomberg dept
Way back in 2006, we wrote about how silly it was that all of these old school media companies were suddenly hiring "chief digital officers" or "chief internet officers" -- and how that was a sign that they were in trouble. That's because "digital" or "internet" is not a separate silo. Companies that are going to succeed today on the internet need to get to the point where the internet simply infuses everything they do -- such that they don't even need to be thinking about it as a "separate thing." It's just part of what they do. Many of the companies who went down that route discovered that pretty quickly. Those top "digital" people often had no real power or no real authority, and with the companies hiring them, it made others believe that they didn't need to be thinking about the internet, because "someone else has got it covered."I'm kind of surprised that any company is still thinking that way, but apparently Bloomberg has just hired a former GE exec to be its "head of global digital innovation." Bloomberg has been, somewhat notoriously, going through some turmoil lately in its news division, and setting up a separate silo to focus on "digital" seems like the exact wrong strategy, yet again. The company either is digital or it's not... and having to hire someone to focus on digital innovation suggests... it's not.
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Filed Under: digital innovation, media
Companies: bloomberg
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How fitting
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But for many of those otherwise-smart people who at first thought the internet would be just another passing fad, and then stubbornly fought the 'digital revolution' tooth and nail ... well, the future finally caught up to them -- like neck-deep quicksand.
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Re:
make it 40 year and you should be about right..
The problem here is:
WHAT IS DIGITAL?
DIGITAL WHAT?
Watches?? been there done that..TO DEATH..
To many people are using a SUDO -dictionary..and making their OWN meanings, and NOT konwing what they are even SAYING..
WHAT WILL THIS PERSON DO??
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Re: Re: SUDO-dictionary, etc.
Well, 40 years ago there were so-called "digital" clocks that worked by dropping metal plates with numbers painted on them off a rotating spool (presumably it would no longer be "digital" if clock faces had been painted on each of those plates instead of numbers)
The 100+ year old IBM punch card (base-92?) could probably also be classified as a form of "digital" media, at least in a strict technical sense, but to most of us, the term "digital" generally refers to any content that can be instantly transmitted across the globe an infinite number of times without any degradation.
I couldn't find any such "SUDO" dictionary - or even the word "SUDO" in any dictionary - but hey, how about a SUMO dictionary?
http://www.sumotalk.com/glossary.htm
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Re: Re: Re: SUDO-dictionary, etc.
pseu·do
ˈso͞odō/
adjective
adjective: pseudo
1.
not genuine; sham.
"we are talking about real journalists and not the pseudo kind"
synonyms: bogus, sham, phony, artificial, mock, ersatz, quasi-, fake, false, spurious, deceptive, misleading, assumed, contrived, affected, insincere; More
informalpretend, put-on
"her 'diamonds' are so pseudo"
antonyms: genuine
Origin
More
late Middle English: independent use of pseudo-.
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Re: Re: Re: SUDO-dictionary, etc.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/world/asia/bloomberg-news-is-said-to-curb-articles-that-might- anger-china.html
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Still, it's amusing to see the companies hiring some pretty brilliant minds nowadays to change stuff. And when they arrive in their workplaces they are told to do exactly as the company has been doing wrong and end up arguing with the company management when they try to introduce effective change.
Of course one must also question if the person accepting such titles aren't just in for the money..
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Clueless
There are three basic activities a site could fulfill: point of contact for customers, point of "sale" for customers, and point of contact for vendors. The importance of each varies, so there is no one solution but what a company does offline should be an excellent guide to what they need to online.
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