I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . The text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change, but each chapter has a case study or guest column.
Chapter 5 has two guest columns from what I call “crossover” executives. Vendors are hiring talent from user organizations; user organizations are hiring talent from vendors and startups. Tony Scott, CIO at Microsoft went there after stints at Disney and GM, and in the other direction, Vijay Ravindran, the Chief Digital Officer at Washington Post, did stints at Amazon and other startups.
Here are some excerpts from Vijay’s column
In the late summer of 2008, I was approached by an Amazon.com director, my former employer, about my possible interest in a unique position being created by Don Graham, the CEO and Chairman of The Washington Post Company. The position would be focused on digital news, specifically of innovating beyond the quarter-to-quarter improvement all operating businesses hope to make, but instead on a “big swing” looking out five years and beyond, and seeing if we can “skip a generation.” So began the recruitment and my eventual hiring as Chief Digital Officer.
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This role demands tremendous breadth. I currently divide my time across a variety of initiatives and roles:
· The WaPo Labs team continues to grow and the team launched Trove, a personalized news aggregation site with associated apps, and is mainly focused on growing Trove as consumer destination while componentizing aspects of the personalization technology to offer back to Washington Post and Slate. Trove offers cutting-edge personalization of news using users’ Facebook personas to help create a unique news reading experience.
· Using technology originally developed at Avenue100, we’ve incubated SocialCode, a Facebook advertising agency that leverages Facebook’s self-service advertising platform but targets big brands and their agencies as clients. The business has gone from not existing 18 months ago to being a real company with dozens of employees working across many dozens of clients.
· I work closely with the leadership of Slate and Washington Post on new endeavors and selected business development. Both sites are undergoing major software infrastructure upgrades, including their core content management processes. In the case of the Washington Post, the entire online business was managed as a separate company until 2008, and the integration has been a complex process of people and infrastructure.
· I serve on an advisory group for Kaplan Test Prep’s innovation efforts. Kaplan’s Test Prep business faces a completely different set of challenges than a decade ago. And while my current role is quite small, there are quite a few legacy parallels to the challenges faced by the Washington Post. For instance, just like Washington Post faces niche content challengers across local news and politics, every specific test prep area is battleground for Kaplan with new upstarts.
· I help TWPC make several angel and Series A investments in technology startups including those in Ongo and Fab.
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The biggest impact I had in the first year, and continue to have, is to reshape the image that technical leaders to the existing senior management both at Corporate and the operating units. They had only thought of technology as “IT” and the technical organizations were fairly subservient organizations. By Don’s creation of my position, I’ve been able to showcase the level of product and business thinking that can turbocharge having a deep technical background. The kind of technology executive that is at Amazon and its peers had finally made it to a company that had never seen anything like it before.
Photo Credit: Washington Post.
When the Post launched its iPad app in 2011, it created a humorous video of a befuddled Bob Woodward being pulled away from his trusty typewriter and asking his editor, Ben Bradlee, about the allure of the iPad. It was a throwback to the huge influence the newspaper had in the 1970s in bringing down the Nixon Presidency with its investigative coverage of Watergate,
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