I spoke recently at an interesting monthly gathering of smart, switched-on tech and media leaders in Brooklyn organized by the very talented Sam Lessin – also known among friends of his accomplished father Bob, as “Lessin 2.0.”  The salon is called Y+30 and challenges its presenters to discuss a different industry each month, focusing on what it might be like 30 years into the future.  Although daunting at first, this challenge is strangely liberating for those of us whose normal strategic horizon is the quite tactical and incremental three to five years.

For my talk, I chose the future of financial information, and focused on how one day public company disclosure might overcome its current limits of time and space.  In particular, I posited a world awash in financial and operating data in which company executives no longer pretended to control the timing and nature of information about their enterprises which is disclosed to the public through then outdated constructs such as 10-Ks, 10-Qs and press releases.  Instead there would be a constant flow of data directly distributed from every firm’s ERP systems. Similarly, such antiquated geographical concepts as onshore vs. offshore markets, domestic regulation and “flowback” would be rendered meaningless by seamless global trading and regulation.

Granted, these ideas are a bit far-fetched, but that is precisely the ground rules of Y+30.  Given the calls for greater international regulatory coordination in response to the current economic crisis and the prevalence already today of expert networks like Gerson Lehman and primary research such as pinging ecommerce sites for sales data, perhaps my vision is, in fact, not sufficiently long-sighted.

In the event, my talk itself and the ensuing discussion was not particularly controversial (at least in this crowd), but my answer to a somewhat unrelated question on the future of newspapers has been ricocheting in an increasingly inaccurate way across the blogosphere.  I did, in fact, imagine a future (again 30 years hence) when a newspaper (in my example my hometown New York Times) could employ only 60 journalists rather than the hundreds who work there today.  In my example, I challenged our conception of what a newspaper must include and imagined my theoretically ideal paper which combined New York Times content on the Middle-East, the FT on Europe, the Wall Street Journal or Reuters for finance, ESPN for sports and so on.  The web, of course, already makes such a mash-up possible today either through browser tabs or RSS feeds.

In this sort of disaggregated world, the NYT would not need a staff of hundreds to produce a fully integrated newspaper, any more than Apple needs to manufacture its own hard drives or touch screens.  I imagined that to really focus on one or two core strengths that it could do better than any other publication, the Times might need 30 star journalists – the Tom Friedmans and William Safires, a couple of great editors, and then an up and coming group (or farm system) of 30 junior staff who could grow into the next generation of stars.  I readily admit this would be much different from our current view of what a newspaper should look like, but ironically this alternative reality is not so far removed from that apparently described by the great Times editor Max Frankel in a memo to management several years ago (see The Inheritance Vanity Fair, May 2009).

Even if this vision of a more open and interoperable newspaper were financially viable, it will be difficult for the current generation of integrated papers to get there.  I know from painful personal experience at Reuters that it is much easier to build new from zero to 60 staff than to reduce 1000 to 60.  Moreover, there is no reason to believe (just because I came up with a low number to be intentionally provocative) that the “right” number is not 200 or 300.  The principle, however, is the same.  When I fly on American Airlines, I am actually pleased they feature Starbucks coffee rather than American Airlines coffee.  I don’t want Starbucks baristas flying or maintaining the 777, but I see no reason other than inertia why every function must be staffed by “insiders.” 

The modern digital world is increasingly frictionless.  This requires every company that wishes to survive and prosper to really understand and focus on its core competence.  To repeatedly ask “what do we do better than anyone else?  What defines us?”  At Thomson Reuters, some of our businesses used to build their own computer hardware and operate communications networks, but these are not our core skill set.  Today we still build our own editing systems, but likely not for ever.  Newspapers are glorious, fabled institutions which serve an important civic role, but that does not give them a perpetual bye to avoid change and reinvention like the rest of us.