Don't Ditch Your Mission & Change Your Culture (even if your customers want you to)

Wow. Here is an interesting story about Business Week Magazine going under.

Magazine for sale!

Times are tough when an iconic magazine like BusinessWeek is up for sale. After reporting on business for nearly 80 years, you’d think they would know enough to turn it around. Kind of ironic.

Here’s an interesting video from Bruce Nussbaum, editor of Nussbaum on Design, for BusinessWeek. As an insider, he says it was the culture that took BusinessWeek down. Not the internet. Not declining advertising. Not the financial collapse. But culture. That's interesting stuff, considering the year we just had.

He points out that the shift in culture happened when they instituted customer surveys to better meet the needs of the BusinessWeek reader. A good example of why surveys can be dangerous. The editors at BusinessWeek broadened their scope to include more topics the readers wanted. This was a fundamental shift in culture from a specialist with indepth coverage on a few important topics to a generalist approach with less coverage, on a wider variety of topics.

In an attempt to broaden their audience they changed their culture and lost what made them valuable to a loyal band of readers. BusinessWeek lost what separated them from the pack, what made them unique.

This doesn’t make good business sense, any week.

From a Courtney & Company newsletter.