Philip H. Seager

Scenario Planning: Your Playbook for the Future

“There’s no playbook for this.” That’s what CEO Michael Lynton told Associated Press following a devastating cyberattack that crippled Sony’s computers, stole its data and nearly scuppered the release of its controversial movie, The Interview. Stories like this should serve as a wake-up call to all managers, no matter if they are in the media and entertainment industry or not. But the response should not be one of hand-wringing, hoping and praying your company won’t be next. There are actions you can take so that you do have a playbook—not just for eventualities like a cyberattack but to envisage your future business environment more clearly so that you make better strategic choices. Scenario planning, the subject of this chapter, is a helpful way of future-proofing your business.

“Show Me the Money!” Getting Inside the Bottom Line

With few exceptions, media executives are not CFOs. Many are probably like the CEO of a radio and television station who said that, when it comes to financial matters, he generally leaves it to other people. But he wonders: “If they don’t tell me the whole story, would I know enough about the financial performance of the company?” This brief chapter can’t cover all there is to know about financial accounting. But it covers the key points for non-accountants to grasp, so they will be able to read financial statements and know the right questions to ask.

Managing Creative People: Time to Tear Up the Handbook?

Understanding what motivates creative people, and then channeling their passions and energies toward some common business purpose, is not an easy balance to get right. This chapter explores what a manger in this situation can do. It starts by understanding some of the basic paradigms underlying human resource management in general. There are 10 practical tips for motivating change that emerged during a visit to Sony Pictures’ studio lot in Los Angeles. This chapter also includes an interview with a Danish media executive. She discusses how to manage creative personality types and the responsibilities of a manager to provide learning opportunities in order to prepare employees for the digital disruption happening in the media industry today.

Strategy: The Soul of Your Business

Today Hearst Corporation is one of the world’s largest diversified media companies. When Frank A. Bennack, Jr., stepped down as CEO in 2013, 90 percent of the businesses Hearst was in did not even exist or were not part of the company when he started in 1979. “One of the things you have to realize and recognize,” he told a Media AMP Leadership Forum in New York City, “is that this change is accelerating. When somebody says to you, ‘That’s going to take years,’ not today, because the pace of change is so rapid. So what does this mean from a strategic point of view? What does this mean for what you have to do as someone employed to change the strategy of your company?” This chapter deals with strategy. We will consider the frameworks most commonly used today. By the end, managers should be in a position to discuss their own organization’s strategy and then make decisions regarding the strategic directions of their companies or business units, taking into account how the frameworks play out in the realm of media and entertainment.

Corporate and Entrepreneurial Finance: Moving Your Business from Back of the Envelope to Front of the Class

This chapter is about how to improve managerial decision-making using the basic diagnostic tools of financial management and valuation techniques—even for valuing a startup enterprise that doesn’t exist yet. This chapter includes interviews with US venture capitalist Alan Patricof and the managing director of a digital media startup in Germany. She shares the challenges of going from a traditional publishing industry to a startup environment, and the skills needed to help a small company grow.

The Digital Economy: It’s Not the Technology, It’s the Business Model, Stupid!

That technology is reshaping the media and entertainment landscape goes without saying. Digital devices are dramatically changing everything we do and every way we work today. Media and entertainment executives will be familiar with most of them. The focus of this chapter is on understanding the underlying business models and ecosystems on which today’s digital revolution is being built. It discusses some of the key trends in online business and tries to project their future implications. Most important is the need to adopt a digital mindset—because no matter what new tech innovation comes next, you, as a manager, need to have the capabilities and competencies to be ready for anything.

Marketing in a New Media World

Is marketing to blame for ruining the media and entertainment industry—with Hollywood movies focus-grouped to death, and news turned into click bait infotainment? It depends on whether you perceive marketing as a wall or frontier. The big studio structure certainly throws up plenty of walls, but there are also plenty of new frontiers. This chapter introduces several key marketing concepts and shows how media and entertainment executives might use them to refine their analysis of business problems, enrich their debates and improve their decision-making. As the Hollywood executive Peter Bart says, “There’s extraordinary opportunity around the world in new media; we’re in a great moment in terms of the way the world is acknowledging content.” In this regard, good marketing can help.

The Big Picture: Four Trends That Change Everything

From Brexit to Trump, 2016 was a year of dramatic moves that shook up decades-long ways of doing things. In another shake-up, The Independent national newspaper in Britain decided to cease its print publication after 30 years and go completely digital in a bid to meet the real needs of modern readers and “ensure a sustainable and profitable future,” according to the paper’s owners. With the writing on the wall for much of the media and entertainment industry as it currently stands, here is an example of a business trying to do something about it. This chapter highlights four big-picture trends that will remain relevant to media and entertainment professionals operating in this world of rapid change. The rest of the book has specific chapters, each going deep on a general management topic. With these predictions in mind, media and entertainment executives and managers can plan some dramatic moves of their own.

Operations Management: Not Just What You Do, But How You Do It

Every media business has some activities required to make a product or service and deliver it into the hands of the end user: that’s operations. If leveraged well, operations (the how we do things in the company) can themselves become a source of competitive advantage, not only in terms of gaining a strong cost position through greater efficiencies, but also in being able to offer breakthrough levels of value that others can’t. This is especially true in the era of digitization. This chapter looks at some of the fundamental methodologies and tools that can be used to improve processes, particularly those where you need to engage customers in delivering an experience—very relevant for media and entertainment operations. Even though today’s new technologies are ushering in radically new business models, the fundamentals of operations management remain just as valid and applicable.

Decision Analysis: The “Science” of Predicting Your Next Hit

Chap. 5 outlined a process for making unstructured decisions, which drew heavily on intuition, creativity and a deep understanding of yourself, as a person and as a leader, to work with and through other people to accomplish some higher goal or purpose. It was more about the art of decision-making, whereas this chapter looks more at the “science.” The use of quotation marks is deliberate, because even though the decision-making tool described in this chapter is a proven methodology to improve decision-making processes, it is by no means foolproof. This chapter shows how someone might decide whether it is worth obtaining the screening rights to a movie. While it may not guarantee a hit, it will at least guarantee that the best decision possible was made at the time and limit the likelihood of making a bad or random decision.