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The Institute’s Round Table on, "Does New Media Mean New Management?" held on October 6, 1998, marks its sixth such event in an ongoing series dealing with new dimensions for managing technological innovation and electronic business in an increasingly digital business environment. These Round Tables provide much-needed dialogue involving key management and technology practitioners and leading scholars in relevant fields.

This Round Table’s focus on new media was primarily managerial. It centered on the question, "Does new media mean new management?" It took a hard look at several new media companies that publish important digital, and for some firms also print, publications which are largely successful competing in the increasingly complex new media industry.

Opening the event, George Lieberman, First Vice President and Senior Director of Technology Strategy and Planning at Merrill Lynch and Chairman of the Corporate Advisory Board of the Institute for Technology and Enterprise, emphasized that every industry in the world faces a tremendous challenge in seeking profitability and effective management due to the power of the Internet to transform the way people and companies conduct business. He noted a growing confusion in this setting on how to manage effectively and how to keep up with new markets. George stressed the critical importance and pragmatic benefit of forums like the Institute’s Round Tables in helping accelerate innovative integration of technology and management and in promoting the forward thinking demanded by the fast-changing business arena. Click here to review video segment (2 min., 13 sec.).

The event started with a candid keynote speech by Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company, followed by an audience Q & A. Alan, in effect, presented a living case study. He explained how the "Fast Company world" has evolved in parallel with the onset of the new media industry. The Round Table continued with three panel discussions and open-audience interaction with various editors and business leaders representing several new media companies, including C/NET, Wall Street Journal Interactive, The Industry Standard, CMPnet, @NY, Salon Magazine and Red Herring. Out of the entire Round Table experience, key management implications emerged, which can now serve as a foundation for much further serious academic and practitioner attention.

This cadre of media veterans, many of whose roots are grounded in traditional print publishing, candidly discussed such management challenges as:

• moving an enterprise delivering paper products to one that also delivers digital products;
• creating purely digital-content businesses; and
• juggling both digital and print businesses simultaneously.

Surprisingly, new media management is an under-researched and neglected topic, despite overwhelming attention to the products comprising this emerging industry. Thus, this Round Table was an opportune platform and starting point for serious discussion and further research.