"Skip" Prichard on Publishing

Skip Prichard, CEO of Ingram's Content Group and a long-time executive in the publishing industry gave the keynote at eContent's Buying and Selling conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. Being an alum of Lexis-Nexis, Elsevier, Ingram Books and Proquest, his career has been an homage to digital convergence.

He recalled being asked by a reporter to speak to the future of publishing, Prichard offered these tidbits:

• Standard Operating Procedures -- need to be revised. Disrupt the status quo because you can become a slave to tradition, versus looking at the situation with fresh eyes. Chances are your competition does not have the same constraints as your SOP. 
• Unprecedented Opportunity in terms of building audiences (look no further than GroupOn). Of course that opportunity means constant stress and pressure... because
• Competition is everywhere. It is global -- and it is relentless. There are no resting on laurels.

While little of what Prichard said was new or a surprise to me, he refreshingly gave real-world examples of how publishers need to embrace change by deftly calling on his own experience. Too often, pundits and executives speak in platitudes and such generalities that the subject could as easily be about March Madness as it is about Digital Publishing. By drawing from his own experience it changes blah-blah to rah-rah -- and I believe, actually works to inspire people to take action.

That would be an interesting exercise. Poll conference attendees to find out how the information they learned will be applied.