The CEO tells how to get a company to subscribe to the same vision.
Question: How can a business leader develop the right vision?
Spanfeller: At the beginning of the day or the end of the day, it’s about a certain vision all right. So, I think a good leader will come upon that vision right, and I mean like a legislations, a vision where the company should be and how it should get there and it’s not really incredibly all important, that be the right vision because there’s going to be a lot of right ways to go, it’s really important is that that leader gets buy into that and that the people that work in that company believe in it and then that there’s a fairly tight very controlled focus on reaching it so you get everybody working in the same path and then you weed out all the impediments on that path. Especially, of that vision which usually is, is a different vision what the company has been doing prior. So, you know, right now we’ll see how this works but we’re taking two different cultures at Forbes, the magazine culture and online culture are pushing them together. And neither one of those cultures is necessarily the ennoble, that where from online and it was for the magazine but now we’re going to have to find you know, a new vision if you will, a new culture for the combined entity.
Question: What does this mean at Forbes?
Spanfeller: We’re still learning on both sides of the equation, folks who have been you know, online natives have to learn print and print natives have to learn online and so there’s going to be some level of lag in education that will take place and that in of itself just by only X amount of hours in a day will make us less efficient for some period of time. Now, everyone else are going to that same dynamic so hopefully it won’t be that long and hopefully we’ll come out of it in a even more efficient way than when we’re into it and therefore we’ll have benefit from the whole process of course that is in fact the goal and the strategy behind doing it but now we’re going to execute on it.
