Alokananda Chakraborty: Managing without control

The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change
Bharat Anand
Penguin Random House India
423 pages; Rs 599
 
We always knew digital was going to change things, but most of us didn’t realise how close to home it would hit. The problem is that most accounts of digital transformation focus on Silicon Valley stars and tech unicorns. By and large, authors have chosen sides, either mourning the old or hailing the new. The far-reaching implications of digital technology and the way it impinges on strategy have not been discussed deeply. The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand, professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, is an outstanding account of how businesses can be transformed into more profitable and viable sources of value using modern technology. Had it been published five years ago, the book would have been labelled as visionary.

 

The narrative spins off a single anecdote: The Yellowstone Fires of 1988. Yellowstone in the USA is the world’s oldest national park, and by the time the 1988 fire episode was over, nearly a month after it started, 20 per cent of the area Yellowstone covered had been burnt down.
 
If the fire’s triggers were unremarkable — a woodcutter dropped a still-burning cigarette into the grass — the response to fighting them was anything but. As people learnt later, there were great disagreements among neighbouring park and forest supervisors about how to manage the fire, all of which led to the devastating impact on the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

 
What could have made the stakeholders collude in such a catastrophe? To explore these separate threads, Mr Anand traces each to its source, and unravels our biases in decision-making. “They also contain lessons for managers in faraway arenas like media and entertainment, which have been experiencing ‘digital fires’ for more than two decades,’’ says the author.
 
Mr Anand’s findings on decision-making may not be novel but he provides a perspective that is worth remembering. “We are not accustomed to managing without control. But we’d better get used to it. It affects strategy — knowing whether to intervene. It affects timing — knowing when to intervene. It affects process — knowing how to intervene… And in each case we can do better by understanding the connections,” he explains.

 
Here’s the connection: In every industry, players are taking advantage of new platforms, tools, and relationships to undercut competitors, get closer to customers, and disrupt the usual ways of doing business. The only way to compete is to evolve. But to evolve they have to overcome two basic challenges, says the author — “getting noticed” and “getting paid”.
 
So how do you get noticed and finally get paid? Today, all businesses see themselves as content creators. But more than the content, it is the connections they make that determine their success — which comes from unearthing related opportunities and “in avoiding the view that the choices you make should be based on someone else’s or in identifying best or worst practices that everyone should adopt or avoid.”

 
The term “digital” in the subtitle of The Content Trap is seductive and it may encourage you to pick up the book on this count alone. While digital certainly is its core topic, the book will take you through a range of issues that will finally decide whether a business will be “noticed” or “get paid”. These issues range from talent management to the future of learning. In fact, the book reminds you of Bill Bryson’s Made in America that gave a sweeping view of the history and evolution of culture in America while discussing its central idea, which was an informal history of the English language in the United States. Likewise, The Content Trap exposes you to the inner workings of many brands, industries, markets that touched or were touched by the changes Mr Anand discusses in the book.

 
At 423 pages (including notes, bibliography and index), The Content Trap  might appear a little too thick at the outset, but it has relatively few downsides if you fit into the book’s target market (a business looking to competitively navigate the turbulent waters of change). If you don’t fit into that category, some initial parts of the book may seem more targeted at big businesses that command a lot of resources. As you work through the book, however, Mr Anand begins to include examples of smaller brands from different countries — including our very own Flipkart (Chapter 22, From Atoms to Bits) and its lessons can be leveraged even by even non-tech businesses.