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Reporters sans frontières – Russia

Yesterday was spent transferring personal files off of my old T-42 Thinkpad just as its little hard disk started to max out (took me eight months to fill 40 gigs), backing up my Outlook .pst, taking pictures off the walls and handing over files to Rob O’Regan, the guy who will take over for me as the GM of Online at CXO. After an exit interview with the head of HR, a quick pass around the office to shake hands and say farewell (keeping it short, for nothing is more awkward than a sentimental goodbye), dumping the Thinkpad on Rob to return to IT and my card key to the building manager, I was out the door and in the parking lot, turning around one last time to snap a picture of the building with my Treo, and telling myself to stop being conscious of every action as "this is the last time I’ll do this."

 There is a strange sense of psychological dislocation when one lands between jobs. The worst separation anxiety for me was in the summer of 2000 when I left Forbes.com to join McKinsey after 13 awesome years at that great publication. A big send-off party, total embarassment as the staff and management roasted me for wearing bowties and pointed out other eccentricities (taking a born-again candidate for online sales to a strip joint; using a napkin stuffed under one lense of my eyeglasses as a makeshift eye patch after going literally cross-eyed during the weeks preceding the launch of Forbes.com ….) all ending with a sad and final thud as I drove out of Manhattan to Cape Cod with a car filled with mementos and my Herman Miller Aeron chair, a totem of the dot.bomb if there ever was one.

 Thirteen years at one place and it was time to decide if I was in Forbes for life — the kind of cradle-to-grave loyalty to a company that our grandparents and even parents may have had in their careers — or was I going to start flitting from one challenge to the next? McKinsey lasted barely two years — not abnormal as the average tenure at The Firm is about two years, and following the horror of 9/11, when I arrived in Manhattan that morning on the Delta Shuttle, the same morning the terrorists commandeered other planes leaving Boston, hearing a bike messenger mention a plane had hit the WTC and thinking it was a joke …. and then watching the whole affair unfold on a television set on the 34th floor of McKinsey’s midtown offices … seeing people completely covered in dust walk through a mobbed Grand Central like they had been rolled in flour …. and then riding a MetroNorth train out of town to New Haven just to get the hell away ….

Something changed me that fall in NYC that propelled me to take a twisted job in Switzerland trying to turn around a failed e-banking project for a consortium of private banks, and by January I was sitting in an office in Liechtenstein that smelled of manure from the cow pasture outside, kidding myself that I could learn German, completely freaked out that I was living the nightmare of turning around a bad dot.com project as the dot.com world was limping into irrelevance back in the states.

When the Swiss gig ended in the fall of 2003 I was, for the first time in my career, "on the beach" as they said at McKinsey, looking for a return to online media in a market that was severely depressed. So I went freelance — ghosted a book on IT sourcing strategies, consulted to a financial PR firm, helped a couple startups with their business plans — but the entire time hoping I could get back on the online bus and return to the kind of chaos and challenge that I thrived on in the mid-90s at Forbes.com, when everyone was a pioneer and you made it up as you went along.

Alas, the online media world had matured and there were no "great" jobs like the one I had in 94, when a single person could attempt to set technology policy, manage the P&L, be editor and publisher all in one messy job. I like chaos and deadlines — its the reporter’s DNA — but by 2004 all the online jobs were now structured and filled with process. The Wild West had been tamed and I felt like some hermit of a mountain man come down from the hills with a load of pelts to find that Deadwood had a Starbucks.

Signs of life in the online job market began to appear by the summer of 2004 and a year ago I was gunning for some interesting gigs — mostly in NYC — when Rob O’Regan gave me a call. The back story on Rob is that we first met at PC Week in 1985 when I left the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune for my first tech journalism job writing about LANs and error correction protocols and the early days of Microsoft and DOS. Rob was on the copy desk, I was in the business news section, and when it came time in 1997 to find a managing editor for Forbes.com I invited Rob in to see if he was interested in moving his life to NYC from New Hampshire. He wasn’t, but when I went looking for someone to help me get the failed McKinsey project off the ground in 2000, he was the guy I called, outlasting me at McK until 2004 when he joined IDG as the founding editor of CMO Magazine.

Rob told me CXO — the IDG unit that published CIO Magazine, CSO and at the time, CMO — needed someone run their online operations. The leadership of IDG, Pat McGovern the chairman and founder, and Pat Kenealy, the CEO, had issued the strategic imperative that the company diversify its publishing revenues and move more aggressively online following a somewhat weak move in the 90s. I started discussions with CXO’s management exactly a year ago, met the online team, and balanced the opportunity against a much more prestigious one with a massive global news organization based in NYC. In the end I went for the CXO job basically because the job was most like the one at Forbes.com in 1995 — lots of cross-function responsibility in tech, sales, operations and edit — and because it was evident that CXO might be building a network of brands aimed at the c-level functions in an organization, focusing on the point where technology affected the job function.

Cool, a network of c-level brands, the chance to reform the infrastructure, and a chance to see if I could rework the magic that put Forbes.com way ahead of its traditional competitors in the 90s (that formula was simple, "tools not text", databases and lists as opposed to stories).

So on May 2 of 2005 I arrived in Framingham (not the most pleasant location on the planet) and dove in. By August we were beginning to fly. Traffic — specifically page views and monthly unique visitors — were up and climbing and by the beginning of the fiscal year in October, we were already hitting the targets I set for the end of the new fiscal year. The sun was shining and the wind was at our back. We executed contracts to install a real content management system and search engine, were fixing the ad insertion operation, and beginning the laborious process of integrating the editorial operation.

Now it is a firm rule of mine not to be retromingent and fire the stern-chaser cannon as I sail away from one job to the next. IDG does indeed deserve its reputation as one of the best companies to work for in the world. Its HR politics, benefits, and decentralized culture are very staff friendly. The team at CXO Online was, in many regards, the equal and superior of the founding team at Forbes.com. The individuals there had a lot of hard won experience and perspective earned outside over the past decade and everyone, to apply one of my favorite phrases, "got the joke."

But along came an opportunity in early November that was too intriguing to ignore. Michael Laskoff, principal and founding partner of The Brand Asset Management Group in Manhattan, and a dear friend I first met at McKinsey, phoned to ask if I had a current resume available. Michael, the author of "Ask Your Ass", a delightful guide to unemployment and landing on your feet, screamed at me when I told him I did not have a fresh resume and told me I had an hour to clean one up. So I did and hence was introduced to the team at Lenovo.

So, here I am, in between phases of my career for 72 hours, feeling like Joseph in Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, waiting for induction into the regimentation of the Lenovo "army", tying up loose ends, and taking stock of where I’ve been and where I am going. This will be as severe a departure from my comfort zone as McKinsey was from Forbes, an emphatic step off of the media bus, which, to be frank, felt like it was beginning to careen a bit on bald tires. Now it’s hard core tech time — building a new brand for a Chinese company across the world and building its reputation in the very amorphous, frighteningly fluid world of the web. I am beside myself with fear, awe, and excitement.

My Weblog: Renewed Faith in Apple Brands

I guess Jim is psyched at the Apple Intel announcement. All my Mac buddies are in a state of ecstasy today. Forbes says its the biggest Apple announcement since the Mac’s launch 21 years ago.

 The Million Dollar Homepage – Own a piece of internet history!

One million pixels auctioned off on ebay at a buck a pixel and this is the result.

Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil | Tom’s Hardware

Thanks to Ben Lipman for pointing out how to cool a hot PC. Cooking oil and lots of it.

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Consumer Electronics Show – in Shanghai?

"One thing that the media failed to cover was the continuing shift in production and design of more and more of consumer electronics devices to Taiwan and mainland China. It would have been interesting to do an analysis of how many of the products on display in Las Vegas were manufactured in Taiwan or mainland China and then to determine how many of these products were also designed in those countries.

A good news hook for the story might have been the recent announcement that “China has replaced America as the world’s largest exporter of IT goods” according to new figures released by the OECD. Actually, this happened in 2004, but it was just reported last month. Also, the statistic applies to all IT goods, not just consumer electronics.

OK, I know all the objections. Most of China’s exports are in low-end IT products. A lot of the exports are sub-systems and components that get integrated into IT devices sold by US companies.

Granted. But those of you who read my writings know that my focus is not on the snapshot. My focus instead is on the trajectory and relative pace of change."

Cotuit’s dreams are unveiled by a look through a book – Cotuit – The Barnstable Patriot – Cape Cod & Islands 

I contributed a ton of family photos to this excellent book by local historian, Jim Gould. If you are into Cape Cod history, this is a great book that gives a sense of why Cotuit is so beloved by those of us who make it our home. 

Leander Churbuck

I think this is the painter I have heard a lot about over the years. Falmouth-based. Died 1940.

CMO – The Resource for Marketing Executives – Home Page – CMO Magazine

Sad days for a great publication: 

"CXO Media suspends publication of CMO magazine As we have chronicled in our print magazine and on our website, one of the CMO’s greatest challenges is balancing a plan for long-term growth with the pressures to produce short-term results. An inability to strike the proper balance is a key contributor to the CMO’s startling 24-month average tenure. At CMO magazine, we share your struggles – and your short shelf life. Current business realities require us to suspend publication of our 16-month-old magazine as of the January 2006 issue. The extraordinary feedback and support from the CMO community has not been enough to sustain and grow our advertising-supported business in what has become a severely challenged publishing environment. As a result, we have decided to hit the pause button, take a step back, and consider alternative business plans. It is my sincere hope that we will be able to return with an exciting strategy to invigorate the business and once again begin serving what has quickly become a faithful community of senior marketing executives and other marketing practitioners. We will keep the website lit up so you can continue to access our existing content. And Constantine von Hoffman will continue for now to offer his unique insights from his blog. In the meantime, I would like to thank you, our loyal readers, for your patronage, your thoughtful feedback, and your commitment to helping us build this new brand. I would like to thank our advertisers and sponsors for their staunch support. I would like to thank our publisher, Steve Twombly, along with the rest of the sales, marketing, operations and events staff at CXO Media for their tireless efforts in launching CMO in 2004 and driving it forward over the past year and a half. Most of all, I would like to thank CMO’s talented team of writers, editors and designers for producing a consistently high-quality magazine that surpassed everyone’s expectations. The flame burns brightest, the saying goes, just before it flickers out. CMO has never burned more brightly.

Rob O’Regan, Editor in Chief

Paul Conley blogs a nice tribute. 

PBS | I, Cringely . December 29, 2005 – Stop the Presses!

Cringley takes a unique look at the effect of Yahoo and Google on traditional publishing models, offering a unique perspective that the challenge is the shift in ad spending away from "passive" media, ie a print ad which has no intelligence nor accountability, but real estate, arguing that there is no way a typical web page can duplicate the ad-edit ratio imposed on print by 2nd Class postage rates. While a stretch, he does hit close to the nerve — that the avalanche towards accountable pay-per-click is putting huge deflationary pressure on content value as publisher rush to make the online transition but find there simply isn’t the same economic margins from a page view on "glass" vs paper. 

"…pay-per-click, which is brutally honest, where every successful ad has efficacy and advertisers have a pretty darned good idea what they are getting for their money. This reality is precisely why magazines, newspapers, and television are losing revenue to pay-per-click. It is a trend that is likely to continue, and can only result in a degradation of production standards on the print side to match the reduced revenue potential of the online business, where BS gives way to measurable, though impoverished, results."

The play for publishers is to recast themselves as editorial creators and more as a marketing service firms — this is where lead generation comes in, the online equivalent of the old reader service bingo cards that cluttered the back of most pubs in the past. By becoming extensions to their advertisers’ marketing and sales efforts, publishers are putting themselves periously out into a frontier they are neither comfortable with operationally nor ethically.

I think the play for online publishers is to embrace the one thing that distinguishes them from marketing pimps — their editorial ethics and objectivity — and begin to provide a neutral haven for their audience’s information. Taking that information as currency and then acting as a blind drop broker in sharing it, and protecting it, from advertisers. By continuing to gate content, rent lists, and otherwise pimp their readers to their advertisers, publishers will diminish their credibility further, alienate the audience, and lose the one piece of credibility that distinguishes them from the herd — objectivity and neutrality.

I’ll develop the rant further in the future. 

Lenovo touts notebooks, Olympics push | CNET News.com

January 16 will mark a major personal transition for me as I leave the world of online media for the world of online marketing and global technology. I will be joining Lenovo as Vice-President of Web Marketing, relocating to Raleigh-Durham and the Research Triangle, where I will be working under Lenovo’s Senior Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer, Deepak Advani.

  

 

I’ve had a great eight months at IDG since joining on May 2, 2005, working with the CXO team to realize the value of CIO.com, CMOmagazine.com, CSOonline.com and Darwinmag.com. Traffic is up. Revenues are strong, and the strategy to really make the business takeoff and soar is in place.  CEO Mike Friedenberg has put the company on a solid course towards success, and IDG President, Bob Carrigan has imbued IDG’s global publishing operations with the kind of energy and direction that will insure IDG’s continued status as the preeminent global IT publisher. I’d like to thank my team at CXO Online for their dedication and passion. They are:

 

• Janice Brand, executive editor
• Todd Borglund, chief of production
• Jennifer McCarthy, producer
• William Hall, Custom Producer
• Paul Kerstein, Editor
• Chris Lindquist, Editor
• Joseph Nguyen, Producer
• Irinia Gabecchia, Advertising Operations
• Sandy Kendall, Editor
• Chris Murray, Director of Technology Services
• Sean McCracken, Developer
• Judah Phillips, Analyst

I offer my best wishes to Rob O’Regan, editor-in-chief of CMO Magazine and former McKinsey and PC Week colleague.  Lew McCreary, CXO’s editorial director, Abbie Lundberg, editor-in-chief of CIO, and the many colleagues within CXO and across IDG who have made the past eight months some of the most productive and fulfilling of my career.

Now to answer the question, "why Lenovo?"

Lenovo is best known in the U.S. for its acquisition in late 2004 of IBM’s PC business (that acquisition was completed in the spring of 2005),  taking over the Think line of laptops and desktops. Prior to that deal, the company had a low profile in the US, known in its former incarnation of Legend Computer, the largest PC company in China, a market that Lenovo still dominates with nearly a third of the market share. Lenovo markets its own line of PCs in Asia, separate from the Think line, and is a major player in cellphones and consumer electronics.

Part of my portfolio of responsibilities will be the blogosphere, to build the Lenovo brand online and develop an online strategy that emphasizes Lenovo’s commitment to "innovation that matters." I’ll be operating globally.

The combination of best-in-class products (I blog this on a ThinkPad and lust for an X41 Tablet), an incredibly dynamic global corporation, the  challenge of building the brand (my family and friends all ask, "how do you spell that?"), and my love for the online world ultimately made the decision to join Lenovo the right one.

I will remain reachable through comments here, and on my personal mail david at-sign churbuck dot. com. 

 

 

My Weblog: Intel to Modify Its Branding

 The always-provocative Jim Forbes on Intel’s rebranding announcement going down at CES this week.

"I wish someone would take Intel’s Paul Otellini aside at CES next week and tell him that unless you’re Apple, almost no one buys a computer based on branding."

Hmm. Dunno if I buy into that theory. "Dude, you’re getting a Dell?" Cow boxes from Gateway? Charlie Chaplin? If PCs are toasters — as Forbes once postulated to me when he asked the question: "Ever wonder why there is no trade rag called `ToasterWeek?’", then why do people buy $300 toasters from Williams-Sonoma?

There is always a bit of a bling-bling contest in business class on any airline. Do you want to be Mr. Mediocrity with a clunky notebook that looks like something out of the former East German republic or do you want the thinnest, most platinum, most decked out little cutie on the fold-down tray? It’s all about minimalism, about sleek, about the unobtainable. The commodity in computing is the apps and OS — that’s why Apple is differentiated — but the differential is the quality of the box, the horsepower, and the status of ownership. Having lugged a woefully underpowered, but delightfully designed Fujitsu P2040 Lifebook around Europe, I can attest to the envy that little baby induced in my fellow passengers.

Forbes is right that Intel has to do something about impermeable brand designators like the "Centrino" – who knows what it means? 

As a recent acolyte to the Getting Things Done (GTD) movement — living my life around to-do lists, inboxes, and open loops (read David Allen’s book) — I am always looking way to squeeze the most of the temporal situation. One of Allen’s tips is to organize to-do lists around settings, ie, have a seperate to-do list for when you’re home, running around doing errands, and another for when you are at your desk. Segment the items to the time and setting. Clear your inbox and catch up on reading on a long flight. Make phone calls at your desk when you have an open hour.

Car time is an interesting gap to try to fill. I use my commute to listen to podcasts, return some phone calls (I don’t use a headset and drive a stick-shift, so phoning is not my preferred activity), and thanks to a four-year old device, get some serious work done.

The device of which I speak is the Sony IC Recorder, specifically the ICD-MS1, which I purchased over the summer of 2000 when I joined McKinsey and had the crazed idea that I could use voice recognition software to dictate a novel. (voice recognition is well and good if you train it, but the amount of background noise in a car makes the recognition difficult at best).

The device gathered dust until I read Allen’s book and started using it to dictate my daily to-do list on the ride into work. The controls are intuitive enough to figure out in the dark. I hit record and blurt out whatever random thing I need to do into the microphone, hit pause, think for a second or two, hit pause again and blurt out another item. When I get to my desk I pop out the Sony Memory stick, stick it into an external USB drive, open up the voice recorder software on my Thinkpad, and transcribe the results into a Microsoft One-Note list.

It was pretty expensive at the time — more than $200 — but has paid for itself over the past three months.

Definitely a keeper and I’m sure Sony has a more modern version somewhere in its catalogue. A microcassette recorder would work as well, but the software that Sony provides is very amenable to transcription, with slow-down functions and the ability to archive files into folders.