Take care when pruning

Over at The Daily Beast today, Tina Brown has penned a scathing analysis of the current state of the media industry, and places the blame for its plight at the feet of its managers. Sound surprising? Didn't think so. Even less surprising is the realization that media isn't alone, and that there?s a common thread linking many of our ailing industries at present. Here's Brown?s explanation:

"What do cars, debt risk, and collapsing television networks have in common? The suits running them all lose sight of what they condescendingly call 'product'?i.e., whatever it was that motivated the company's spirit of excellence in the first place. The trouble is, those guys and their appointees don't seem to be the ones who are leaving, do they? Indeed, the recession is giving many of them air cover. 'It's not my fault, it's the times we live in.'"

A more succinct summary would be hard to find, and the inherent lessons are legion. Bearing in mind what we've seen in the recent past, it's probably reasonable to expect that it will serve as prologue to more of the same in the immediate future: People looking out for themselves, rather than what's best for their business. (How many middle managers are going to recommend downsizing their own position to save the creators and producers of products working under them?) That's typically where consultants come in, providing dispassionate analysis of the overall health of a company to ensure that when cuts are made, they're the right ones. At least that's the theory.

There's a danger when an "outsider" assesses any organization that they see people whose results may be intangible as somehow less valuable, and therefore easier to dispense with in a downturn. In her blog, Tina Brown writes at length about the problems besetting the likes of the Tribune Company, which has consistently cut costs by downsizing its editorial and journalistic staff, and has now officially filed for bankruptcy protection. In arriving here, Brown argues that the company has cut away many of its assets - the people that produce the content that made the organization?s reputation - in an attempt to attain positive short-term financial results. She even cites an example, which may or may not be hypothetical, of a Pulitzer-winning journalist being asked to produce an additional five articles per week, with the unsurprising result being an overall drop-off in the quality of that journalist?s work.

Any organization lacking talent and creativity doesn't have a whole lot left to manage, and there comes a point where the benefit of cutting costs is outweighed by the harm done to the organization by those cuts, as seen in the example above. For all companies - and therefore for anyone advising those companies - balancing the need for short-term survival with the ability to thrive in the long term is crucial. While the former is the highest priority for any troubled company right now, failure to achieve the latter may just forestall the inevitable for an unspecified point in the future. That may well be the biggest challenge facing any consultant right now. The danger of not meeting that challenge and cutting talent at the expense of "suits," as Brown puts it, is that, "perhaps the diaspora of talent will re-form and succeed while the companies who ejected them collapse and disappear."

--Posted by Phil Stott