Encouraging Grassroots Innovation at a Legacy Publisher - Tech Forum 2016 - Teresa Elsey
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"Encouraging Grassroots Innovation at a Legacy Publisher" by Teresa Elsey (moderator) with panelists Erin Mallory, Meghan MacDonald, Laura Brady & Ana Maria Allessi, for Tech Forum 2016 - April 1, 2016
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Encouraging Grassroots Innovation at a Legacy Publisher - Tech Forum 2016 - Teresa Elsey
- 1. Encouraging grassroots innovation at a legacy publisher Teresa Elsey, Meghan MacDonald, Erin Mallory, Laura Brady, Ana Maria Allessi
- 3. today’s goal
- 6. Amazon rework hour • stop doing things that don’t work • schedule something • enable others’ efforts • keep your day job
- 8. building Ebookimator • change the scale • use your community • develop your team as well as your tools • market your work
- 10. hackathon participation • use your skills in a new way • take risks in a safe environment • make a tangible sample or proof of concept • support your boss’s or organization’s goals
- 11. themes for innovation • making purposeful change • creating space to experiment • educating others and marketing your work • setting yourself and others up to be successful • investing in your own development and the development of others
- 12. today’s goal more ideas: http://tinyurl.com/10waystoinnovate more accountability: @teresaelsey
Editor's Notes
- Hi, good morning. Welcome to our presentation and panel on grassroots innovation at a legacy publisher. First, I want to introduce our great panel today ... First we have Laura Brady. Laura is an ebook developer, and the principal of Brady Type. She consults on workflow, tools, specifications, and production best practices. She is also one of the committee members responsible for planning ebookcraft, and can often be found tweeting about #eprdctn (eproduction). Next up we have Ana Maria Allessi. Ana Maria joined HarperCollins in 2001 and is currently Vice President of Digital Innovation & Publisher at HarperAudio. She oversees the publication of more than 500 unabridged audiobooks a year, and is host of the podcast HarperAudio Presents, a weekly exchange of ideas with leading authors and book editors. Ana Maria also works with their Chief Digital Officer, supporting global digital innovation for HarperCollins’ authors. Also on today’s panel is Meghan MacDonald. Meghan is the Director of Digital Product Development and Consumer Insights at Penguin Random House Canada. She has many years of experience launching new products like Hazlitt and PenguinRandomHouse.ca. Most recently, she has taken on the challenge of building a consumer insights team and opening a store. And finally we have Erin Mallory. Erin has been working in design and production for over 14 years working with books, magazines and newspapers, and started working with ebooks in 2007. In her current role as Director, Cross-Media, at House of Anansi Press, Erin oversees production of both print books and e-books. She has spoken about e-books and the state of digital publishing at various publishing conferences and has conducted several webinars and workshops on e-book best practices. So a great group, and now I’m going to make them sit here for a little bit and make you listen to me for a little bit. I’m sorry. I’m Teresa Elsey, I’m a digital managing editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Boston, and my group makes the ebooks for our Trade division, more than 1000 ebooks every year.
- And so our subject today is innovation ... and why innovation in publishing, in a conservative industry, might work a little differently. And to start with a little housekeeping, a note on terms … when I say “a legacy publisher” or “a large publisher,” I just mean a place where you encounter some organizational inertia, and where you don’t have the power just to change things by fiat. And maybe a place where “innovation” is a buzzword, but the way to build that into the daily culture of your group is not so obvious. And when I say “grassroots” innovation, though we have some very high-powered folks here today, I’m interested in talking about what kind of innovation can you do when you’re not, when you only can influence your own small corner of your company.
- And also what I mean, what my goal today is, is that we be very concrete and tactical. On our part, we’re going to try to be really down-to-earth and not give you vague inspiring innovation conference-speak. And on your part, I hope you each will leave with one simple, actionable idea you can take back to your office and do on Monday. Something you could write on a post-it note.
- So if we could just take a minute to see who’s here today … Show of hands, who considers that they come from a large publishing company? OK, a medium-size publishing company? A small publisher? And people from somewhere else? Freelancers? People who work with publishers? And who feels like they have fairly broad latitude to make changes where they work? And who has some latitude? And who has to jump through hoops just to get $40 for a subscription or to install a free piece of software on their computer? You guys are my people, thanks. OK, and who feels like as part of their job, or part of their company strategy, they’re charged with “innovating”? And of course there are some obstacles to that … Who feels like finding time is an obstacle? How about encountering resistance from your coworkers? What about having the resources or tools set up that would allow you to innovate? And how about finding time to keep up with the industry, investing in your own learning and the development of your team? Great. More to come on those, welcome everyone. And now, for a quick five minutes, I want to show you a few innovations we’ve done in my group at HMH, just to give you some concrete examples to start with ...
- * Amazon rework hour So this is a really simple one -- you can laugh at me for coming to an innovation conference to tell you about Google spreadsheets -- but just throwing it in here to underscore the “anyone can innovate” point. To some of you this may look familiar -- this is an Amazon rework list, a list of ebook titles that Amazon has determined may contain errors and that they want us to fix and resubmit. And for much of my time at HMH, our list has had about 200 titles on it. So this is my group’s responsibility to deal with this list, but it’s always a little less urgent than making that week’s new ebooks, and the work is pretty tedious and annoying. So while I would share the spreadsheet with my group every week, and talk to them about how keeping the list down was important to our relationship with Amazon, and ask them to chip away at it as they had time, essentially we made no progress on it. So about a year ago, I instituted Amazon rework hour, where I invited all of my group to a weekly hour-long “meeting,” where we would all sit at our desks and work on titles from the rework list simultaneously. I copied the Amazon spreadsheet to a Google Doc, so they could mark off titles as they completed them, and invited everyone to a group chat, where they could complain about things that shouldn’t be on the list and ask each other questions, and have a little bit of social time, in their introvert alone-at-their-desks way. And as of this month, we have so few titles on the list that we don’t need an hour every week, but I’m loath to just cancel the hour because it’s been so effective for us.
- This year, we’re adding five minutes of desk yoga to the beginning of rework hour. I’m not really sure what innovation principles that points to, but FYI.
- * building Ebookimator About two years ago, it became apparent to us that the main tool we used to build ebooks needed to be replaced. Pieces of it had been built over a long period, by an unreliable programmer who was doing a slow fade out on us, and it had so many layers and dependencies that even he couldn’t make updates to it without causing other functions to break. So our production department led an effort to go out and look for vendors who had solutions for this, for taking our custom XML files and building them into epubs. And we sat through a lot of meetings and slide decks from large companies who do this sort of thing, and spent a lot of time explaining our needs and sending samples and wading through marketing materials. And we were getting quotes in the $100-200K range for this. At the same time, we were complaining about this process to our #eprdctn colleagues, who convinced us that the tool we needed was not really that complicated, that if it was them, they would build it themselves. And a coworker and I who were sitting in these meetings, were also telling our programmer husbands about it, and they were saying if you’re really about to pay $100,000 for that, I can do it for less. And eventually we did have my coworker’s husband bid on it, and my group got to get it done with him for under $10,000. And what was really beneficial about the process, about building the tool from the ground up, rather than buying a finished solution, was that it forced us to understand how every bit of it worked. My team was inclined to be a little superstitious about our old tool, to feel that it was a complete black box that worked by magic (and in a lot of ways it was), but testing iterations of the tool and learning to write bugs for the programmer (when THIS goes in, I expect THIS to come out, but instead THIS comes out) really helped them understand . And that’s made them a lot more proficient at customizing and building our ebooks, because they understand how their inputs translate into outputs. And then I wanted to show the rest of the company what we’d done and why, but without making them wade into the intricacies of why we have THIS kind of XML that needs to be transformed to THAT kind of XML. And what I eventually did was made a split screen video, that showed me making an ebook with the old tool on one side and with the new tool on the other, and a stopwatch in between showing that the old way took three minutes, but the new way only took 30 seconds. And I think that’s the best I ever did communicating why’d we’d spent the time to develop this.
- About a year ago, my company announced an internal hackathon. And though it was framed as being open to the whole company, it was mostly for our developer groups -- you know, you needed a login for the technology group wiki to be able to sign up, all the group events were on a floor that we’d never been on, they assigned us a team room to work in, not knowing that none of us have laptops. But my goal wasn’t to win the hackathon, or to demonstrate that we had coding skills like those of our developer groups. They were just 1) To get my team to think of themselves as technical employees -- just to convince them that they were allowed to be a part of this. And what I wanted to do was to make a website -- to show my group that their HTML and CSS skills were equally applicable in that context, and also to make a project that would be immediately accessible and understandable to our coworkers, unlike an ebook, which, if you send someone an epub, they’re like, well, can’t open that, moving on. And I got to teach them a bunch of new things in the process -- we got everyone using GitHub, making their own branches and using pull requests, and we tested on mobile phones, and we got good advice from one of our print designers about how not to make our page look like it was straight out of 1998. And one of my employees, despite not knowing any JavaScript herself, got impatient with waiting on me to fix something, and did it herself. 2) And my second goal was to market my group as a technical group. We have a lot of problems with being embedded in an editorial group -- our technology needs are more demanding, we can’t pay technical salaries -- so we just wanted our division to see the kind of work we can do, again in an easily accessible way. And this may have actually worked a little too well, because our corporate communications team interviewed us as part of a hackathon video they were making, and now they use a picture of me typing as a stock image of “woman coding.” What we built was an ebook discovery website, where you could filter books by different criteria, and then click to get more information and a buy link. And just to be clear this was very naively done, not particularly updateable, and I thought just the experience of doing it was as far as it would go. But as a coda, just recently my boss’s boss was looped in on a conversation about how our K12 salespeople have difficulty getting information about Trade books that they might sell into classrooms. And she was able to say, hey, you should actually look at this thing our ebook group built -- the idea behind our little project was able to be applied to a totally different problem somewhere else in the company.
- And now I want to shift over to our panel, who has a bunch of their own great innovations to talk about. And in talking with them, some sort of common themes emerged in their solutions, some themes that kind of nicely mesh with your concerns about innovation, so I’m going to frame my questions around those …. 10:00: MAKING PURPOSEFUL CHANGE Innovation for the sake of innovation is not likely to work -- it needs to be aligned with actual problems or needs in your business. * Meghan: We talked a bit about how you manage innovation on your team. Can you talk about that? (Encouraging to ask “why”; fitting ideas to company’s goals.) * Ana Maria: You mentioned managing innovation as part of a service group. Can you talk about how you approach that? * For those of you who are managers or leaders, what would you like to see your team doing in terms of innovation? What could entry-level employees be doing, within their power and skills, that would help you innovate? * How do you nurture a culture of innovation where you work? 10:06: CREATING SPACE TO EXPERIMENT * Laura: You have a technique you’re using with your publisher-clients to enable innovation in your work -- can you tell us about that? * Erin: One thing you mentioned to be is doing “one thing different” on every list -- can you talk about that as a way of ensuring innovation? * What are some other things you do to create space for yourself or others to innovate? * What can we do to support innovation from the bottom-up, instead of top-down? 10:12: EDUCATING OTHERS/MARKETING YOUR WORK “First they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win.” * Erin: You and I talked a little about encountering resistance to innovation, and what might cause that. Can you comment on that, and how you’ve handled it? * Meghan: You also talked to me about getting people on board -- I think you called it “getting the army behind you.” What’s your process for that? * One of the things that I think we’re all in vigorous agreement on is that -- whether you like it or not -- innovation comes with the need to support than innovation by educating others or sharing your work. Can we go down the line and all talk about your approaches to doing that? * What kind of strategies do you use to market your work -- to show off the kind of innovation that you’re doing? 10:18: SETTING YOURSELF AND OTHERS UP TO BE SUCCESSFUL * Laura: You’ve been very involved in the online #eprdctn community -- can you talk about what that is, and how it drives innovation across the ebook developer community? * Ana Maria: We talked a bit about what comes after one success, what happens next? (thinking about assembly lines) * What is one small thing you do to make your work better? * What is one thing you can do every day (or regularly) that helps you make change in your organization? 10:24: SELF-INVESTMENT AND DEVELOPMENT * What are you all doing for your personal growth, investment in your own learning, to help build innovation? * What kinds of tools/apps/systems do you use to assist with innovation? * What are you stuck on, innovation wise? What would you want to ask the rest of the panel? 10:30: AUDIENCE QUESTIONS
- And, now, before we take questions, I just want to circle back to today’s goal, that you leave this session with one concrete idea for innovation that you’re going to enact when you get back to your desk on Monday. If you need a few more ideas, I wrote a guest blog post for BookNet Canada, which you can find via this shortened URL: http://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2016/3/3/guest-blog-10-ways-to-innovate-in-your-busy-workday And if you want a bit more accountability for getting it done, feel free to send me a tweet telling me what you’re going to do. Now, are there any questions for the panel?