As you can imagine, magazines’ editorial pages tend to rise or fall depending on the number of ad pages that they have. In the year 2000, magazines published by the Publishers Information Bureau had almost 287,000 ad pages while by the year 2009, the number of ad pages had diminished to almost 170,000 pages. That’s a 41 percent decrease.
As you can imagine, these magazines were thinner. They were using less paper. Paper mills had a lower demand for their products. But with a 41 percent decrease in ad space and paper, there was also a diminished need for pictures to fill up those pages. So photographers were having their businesses squeezed. Additionally, professional photographers had to deal with the many amateur photographers using digital cameras and providing photographs competing with theirs. The professional photography industry was changing and many photographers were having trouble staying in business. The drop in magazine ad business affected other industries as well!
So how does that impact you? Simply this. What and how is your business changing? Wait. Don’t answer that. Maybe more importantly, answer this question. What changes in the industry are impacting your business? What changes in technology are impacting your business? Because technology changes, customer’s expectations change, and we have to adapt our organization. It goes even further than that. Not only do the products that we manufacture and sell need to evolve. Not only do the services change, but there are changes in the marketplace with respect to people. It’s harder to find the right people or the talented people or what we need from a human resource basis.
Our companies are being overrun with changes that we need to adapt to. Now, successful companies and great leaders are working hard to manage those changes but the real superstars are going even further. They’re creating change. They’re looking to reinvent their organization. They’re champions for finding new ways to evolve their organization, to hit the new mark because what they find is if they are the game changer, if they are the ones that are driving the change, then everyone else has a much more difficult time keeping up.
What are you doing to change the game for your organization? But before you can do that, you have to look at your space and you have to say, “What can I eliminate from what we do to create the opportunity for future growth to change the game and to dominate our industry?”
