Long years as an observer of information and media marketplaces have underlined one critical finding: whenever you hear someone say they will never sell an asset, you should be thinking about the circumstances under which they will sell it. I have long applied this thinking to Pearson, or at least since the early days of Marjorie Scardino, since she was so evidently pursuing the meatstore strategy for portfolio decomposition. Under this strategy you first detect the core strategy, in this case the pursuit of education markets globally, and then subordinate the other holdings to that strategy, only investing in non-core where you wanted to ensure that asset values were maintained. Then, every time you needed to make a strategic acquisition, you reached into the meatstore and sold a non-core unit, allowing strategic expansion without heavy debt and encumbrance.

This strategy has moved Pearson from being a collection of brands inherited by Scardino from the family of Lord Cowdray into the largest global force in education markets. It has brilliantly funded strategic purchases like Wall Street English. It has enabled the move from education content to services and now to solutions. It will yet see Pearson emerge as a major global force in online schools and institutions as well as accreditation and content: in a networked world it will be possible to be both a solution, and a supplier to competitor solutions, and a traditional service supplier as markets mature at different speeds and distance or location become less important than measurable quality in educational outputs.

Yet, for all its size, Pearson is still a small player in a large marketplace. And the market is still not fully networked or global, but slow, conservative and locally prone to government spending reduction or cultural differentiation. The downturn in the US disrupted Pearson’s banker market at a time when investment in rest of world markets was the key focus, and slow recovery at a time when governments are getting wise to how to leverage outsourcing, especially in testing and assessment markets, has affected growth and reduced margins. For the first time it may be possible to say that Pearson is shedding non-core assets not to buy strategic positioning but to buy time to allow growth strategies to unfold. This is a new take on the meatstore strategy.

In one real sense the sale of the Financial Times to Nikkei and the currently projected sale of the Economist Group must be good news for all involved. While the Economist had always been managerially independent, the FT had the potential to be a distraction, both in terms of investment needs and managerial time. And the FT, one of the few newspaper groups in the world worth buying, like the Economist, is in part a truly consumer-facing venture. As Pearson has found as it moves into consumer end-user educational markets, the business of selling to consumers is different from institutions. And managing operations that do both is difficult. And indeed structuring the management reporting lines of global consumer/institutional sales and marketing alongside the need for both vertical and global IT strategies is a taxing one. Clearly the two major information corporations who drew on Deloittes in recent years to create global matrix management schema are only in the very earliest stages of getting this right. Increasingly managing process and change is becoming as great a disruptor as technology or markets.

And it could be argued as well that under Pearson’s management the Financial Times has accomplished the huge transition that was required of it, and emerged as a digitally-led business. OK, it’s not a very big nor a very profitable business, but the world must get used to digital information businesses being smaller, and taking time to build margins. Dropping costly print would help, of course. And in the age of automated journalism it may be over-manned, but in that case it has gone to the right home in privately-held, hugely over-manned Nikkei, who will have the patience to see the job through while respecting the tradition. As a bid to move Nikkei off its domestic Japanese base into global markets the move carries less conviction since this is a trick which few Japanese information businesses have managed, but it may be that this is an opportunity for FT management to continue their global brand building in a market where Dow Jones seems to offer less competition than it did in pre-Murdoch days.

Back at Pearsons too, the ball is clearly at management’s feet, since they cannot plead lack of resources once they have completed the disposal of the FT and the Economist, and only have their minority position in Random House Penguin left in the meatstore (though arguably that deal could not have been done without the retention of that stake, so this may not be an active asset for the time being). Can they find an answer to ongoing tests market issues in the now hugely competitive US market (note the sale of the service side of California Test Bureau by McGraw-Hill Education this month). Can they sort the growth prospects in Latin America and make sense of those difficult trading economies? Can they re-align western Europe and exploit the private education potential there? Can they still grow rapidly in China while getting into smartphone dominated markets in India and elsewhere in the region? And all this at speed, using English language learning as a spearhead but not as the sole destination? Well, they have the management talent, though they may not yet have the configuration to make it gel. And they have the technology, though they need to be able to concentrate it on uniform platforms that allow rapid new product iteration. And now, sans FT, they have removed the distractions. The next year is thus critical.

Many people seem to have fallen victim to what I want to call TES (Tech Expectation Syndrome). They get lost in the ocean swells between over-hyped pre-exploitation excitement, and gradual market development under a different guise is a different context. Looking back through my file of words that seem to have disappointed at the top of the typical Gartner expectation spike and are now safely on the plateau of exploitation, I find things like VADs and VANs (now our digital networks), GIS (now a part of every activity known to man since geolocation became the bedrock of mobile telephony), AI (now becoming the M2M nexus of the working world, and so terrifying that even Stephen Hawking cannot exorcise it) …and, of course, VR, the wonderfully exciting 3D environment that we fell in love with, and then decided that headsets were not for us, and that this would only work for dedicated gamers.

And if forgetfulness about how much unexploited technology is available to our new product and service development cycles is one of our sins in the publishing and media marketplaces, let me add another while the Sunday afternoon mood of self-flagellation is upon me. After sustained efforts of re-invention, we keep falling back on PSP (product simulation psychosis). We put extra stuff, more video, longer text, archival support and other elements into the digital “version” and then promote it and sell it just as if it were analogous to the print “version”. We know these things are growing apart but we seem reluctant to acknowledge the difference. No where has this been more marked than in the newspaper industry, which strictly speaking we should now stop calling the newspaper industry. If we called it “news media” we might get closer to seeing how differentiation is taking place, and mark the points at which the digital service elements are going out on a track that print can never follow, and creating information in formats which will become the hallmark of communication. They are the defining moments in the separation of print and digital, and we should point to them whenever some senior executive says (so many do, I am afraid) “There will always be a market for print” or “digital is neat but what are its real advantages for which I would pay extra”.

They still say these things and there have been moments when I have thought the entire news industry would go the way of Yellow Pages, despite Vox, Buzzfeed, Fast Company (and that stubbornly non-innovative digital analogue of print, the Huffington Post). And then last week I saw surprizing green shoots of change, and not from the new digital news industry, but from those good souls who have huffed and puffed up and down the the peaks of inflated expectations a time or two, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The latter have been celebrating Nasdaq’s birthday in fine style. They have taken my pathetic wave metaphors in a different context into a graphers delight, a 3D journey around the index from its inception (http://graphics.wsj.com/3d-nasdaq/). Use it on your mobile, walk round the room with it, or (get this!) get the WSJ headset and really appreciate it. This is not just a beautiful birthday card – you are looking at the way graphical information will be read, or, rather experienced, as the years go on. Here we move away from anything which can be “printed”, and once this style of activity does become the way in which we experience and record change, then only the network can deliver it.

But I would have to reserve special praise for what the New York Times did last week on an architectural review of the new Whitney Museum building (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/19/arts/artsspecial/new-whitney-museum.html). This is a delight to the eye. Once you have seen this you will never want to read a review of a new building which does not include this type of 3D analytical effect. It enhances every readers’ appreciation of the points Michael Kimmelman is making, yet this is VR lite, needing no headset and simply deploying great VR graphics to display the planes and vistas of a new building in a moving dynamic. And until they start moving you think you are just encountering another illustration in text. This answers the question – what would you pay extra for – because it adds a new dimension to understanding which could only have come from this environment.

We have noted here before the way in which old businesses can survive, despite and sometimes because, they are family businesses with a history of transition. A few months ago the Holtzbrinck family cashed their “get out of newspaper jail” card with Springer; both DMGT and Hearst have made huge strides in diminishing the effects of blighted newspaper advertising cycles by becoming experts in B2B data businesses, to the point where these assets begin to dominate all others. But if the Sulzburgers and the Murdochs are to escape then it will probably have to be re-invention that does it, and until last week there seemed to be few signs that this was likely to happen. But here, rather than playing games with the paywall business model, or buying related digital businesses that are not well understood corporately, both of these traditional market players showed early signs of trying to understand how technology could be deployed to add new value for the user. These are late conversions on the road to digital Damascus, but perhaps even more welcome as a result.

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