@JennWebb, a blogger at O’Reilly media has posted a couple interesting posts to the “O’Reilly Radar” the publishers all purpose blog. Both are worth a read, the first covers the tumultuous world of publishing in 2011 and what it portends for 2012. The second is a shorter piece about “$0.99” pricing in the book world. What struck me was how open and self reflective the posts were.
Imagine if GM had a blog where they openly discussed the issues that shaped their market. Pointed to Ford if they were doing something interesting? Linked to a new announcement that Toyota made? Most companies would say that such a strategy was suicidal, but O’Reilly pulls it off.
O’Reilly is a proponent of business model innovation – and they come up with a novel access strategy in the form of Safari.
O’Reilly is staunchly anti-DRM – and they walk the talk by leaving their books free and open.
O’Reilly promotes and supports the “Maker” movement – and they create “trade shows” to make their customers famous and then create a retail division to help distribute these inventions while diversifying their revenue.
O’Reilly talks about “spreading the knowledge of innovators” and does that with every part of the corporation from publishing technical manuals to funding early stage companies.
It makes sense for O’Reilly to do this since a big portion of their business is selling conferences and the intellectual exchange they facilitate and it may not scale from a $100MM business to a company with a 12 figure market cap, but imagine if if P&G discussed the environmental or resource issues that shape it’s strategy? If Target wrote about the demographic shifts that are impacting retail or how they were dealing with the rise of ecommerce? If every company had an ambition that was as broad as O’Reilly’s:
“A diversified media company that focuses on emerging technology communities and what we can do for them”
