The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions

5. Breakthrough Innovation

Seeing the Future

After 50 years of steady growth, the revenues of American newspapers suddenly fell off a cliff, as Figure 5-1 shows. Newspapers around the world suffered a similar fate. The reason is clear: Advertising fled from print media and moved online. Newspaper classified sections, once a highly profitable revenue generator, have largely disappeared. These days, people prefer to search the Internet rather than scan pages and pages of tiny print ads when they are looking for jobs or cars or used merchandise. You can argue that newspapers should have seen the threat coming and done something about it, but the fact is that very few newspapers were alert enough to see the threat to their lucrative classified advertising ...