Friday, March 26, 2010

7 Strategic Questions Business Media Leaders Should Be Asking

Over the last few weeks a major swathe of the quoted business media companies have been reporting their results. While I have covered some of them on this blog I have not done so from the perspective of a financial analyst. Instead, I find it fascinating to see the leadership teams of these companies present their strategy for their businesses.

Individually these results presentations tell a lot about how an individual business is shaping up. What are the threats to their traditional markets? How are they making the transition to a digital future? How strong is the management team? etc. What gets more interesting though is when you aggregate these presentations and try to distil some key themes from them.

So here I would like to pull out 7 key questions that I believe business media companies should be asking themselves if they are to prepare themselves for the years ahead:
  1. What business am I in?
  2. What does my company do really well?
  3. In which markets do we own brands with ‘last-man standing’ advantage?
  4. What is our emerging markets strategy?
  5. What are we doing to move up the value chain of information in your chosen markets?
  6. Is my business structured for the past or the future?
  7. Can I explain my company strategy clearly, simply and believably?
Any others that you’d like to contribute? Please send me your comments to wgstevens2@gmail.com .

from Rory Browns blog