Strategic Intelligence: November 2008 Archives

I recently blogged about a presentation the 2008 Communications Policy Research Forum in Sydney on disruptive innovation in the music industry.

You can now download an Adobe PDF version of the PowerPoint slides here.

The refereed paper has been published in the Proceedings of the Communications Policy Research Forum 2008 (pp. 155-175 or PDF file pp. 179-199).  You can also download a local copy of the paper here.

The paper's case study examines why Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails released their new albums as digital downloads.  I suggest a major reason why, and one that was overlooked by Web 2.0 pundits, is that each artist was in the 'label shopping phase' of a new contract and defected after negotiation problems with their major labels.  This fits a pattern in mergers and acquisitions: the major labels lost artists due to integration problems in a merger or acquisition.  Terra Firma Capital Partners has since partially confirmed this hypothesis: the private equity firm endures more post-acquisition integration problems with EMI and is fighting against government regulation of Great Britain's financial services sector.

The paper's data appendices contrast the artists' strategies with signficant events and innovations in music industry contracts, conglomerate mergers and deal structures.  Somehow I missed U2's March 2008 deal with Live Nation: I found out about it in an October 2008 announcement.  Guns n' Roses also finally released Chinese Democracy (MySpace audio stream): a new album that has taken 15 years, a rumoured US$14 million budget and 14 recording studios in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and London.  I may write a paper on it . . .

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki provides an overview of volatility in the global food market.  Three insights emerge for me:

(1) Differences between policymakers and food security experts at the problem diagnosis stage may have complicated the implementation of structural adjustment programs.  Food security poses solutions that are potentially counterintuitive to policymakers: the former will value food stocks to ensure stability in sovereign nation-state the international political economy whereas the latter may prioritise food flows for international trade, to hedge commodities and currency risks.  Surowiecki explores a contemporary scenario of potential market failure due to demand-supply, pricing and other distortions with the allocation mechanisms.

(2) David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage - in which each nation specialises in the efficient production of goods and services to trade with others for maximum payoff - may not be scalable in its simple form to a complex, interconnected and global system.  Surowiecki's analysis suggests tha the over-reliance on a few countries for specific foods will undermine the global system's resilience and capacity to cope with exogenous shocks and volatility.

(3) Paramaters for investor and market models of the global food market using Vensim simulation software: production supply, demand volatility, pricing, subsidies/tariffs, stocks and flows, and leverage points.  Undertake different short- and long-run simulations noting the role of capacities, dynamics and thresholds, and the impacts of exogenous shocks and volatility.

Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Science of Success (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2008) appears to be the publishing event of the week.

Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink) spearheads a group of writers who are masterful at using anecdotes about insights from statistics, system dynamics and the decision sciences that will interest a broad readership.  This group also in  Chris Anderson (The Long Tail), James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds), Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan), Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist), Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics), and Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball) also belong to this group.  Apart from outliers and tipping points these books explore intuitive decisions, long tail distributions, the Law of the Many, chance, low probabilty high-impact events, martingales, and data-driven decisions.  Each author has a different background: Taleb is an epistemologist and former trader, Anderson is a technology pundit, and Lewis, Gladwell and Surowiecki are essayists and journalists.

For me, six observations emerge from these authors.  First, they have a writing style that appeals to a broad audience.  Second , they provide an introduction to quantitative elements of decision-making and judgments.  Third, their publishers have created a niche market in airport reading and popular science paperbacks.  Fourth, they differ in their approach to theory building: Anderson, Gladwell and Surowiecki take an insight, interview people, and promote it; Taleb, Harford and Lewis draw on their domain experience; and Levitt and Dunbar illustrate how a subject matter expert can collaborate with a journalist to reach a broader audience.  Fifth, their books have seeded a range of Web 2.0 strategies, which vary in rigour, validity, generalisability and applicability to real-world analysis.

Finally, their publishers have used their marketing appeal to build an audience during turnarounds and post-acquisition integrations: Gladwell and Surowiecki helped revive The New Yorker, Levitt and Dunbar's blog gained The New York Times an Internet readership, and Anderson revamped Wired after Conde Nast's acquisition.