Changing the Culture at the Boston Globe

It was a dirty job.

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The Boston Globe is an iconic brand, and a fundamental part of the fabric of New England for 150 years. But, like many newspapers, the 21st century had not been kind. The New York Times had paid $1.1 billion for it in 1993, but by the time Boston Red Sox owner John Henry bought it in 2013, it had gone on sale, so to speak, losing 90 percent of its value.

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Henry’s leadership team hired me to come in and help identify issues within the sales and marketing teams, and identify potential candidates to fill a new role as chief revenue officer. We found a great candidate at Google who was ready to come over and take the job, but he backed out to stay at Google the day before he was scheduled to start.

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It turns out that the best solution was for me to come in and assume the role of CGO and try to help rebuild the sales function from the inside. Even though the company was clearly ailing, it was still producing around $350 million in revenue. In my first meeting with the CEO, it was clear he wanted to see a path toward revenue growth.

 

The problem? The Globe’s structure had essentially devolved into an elaborate life raft. Through attrition, neglect and pure survival instinct, it had become a series of siloed mini-fiefdoms where individuals were doing some heroic work to keep revenue coming in but there was no overarching strategy or direction.

 

For example, a large client like TKTK might have three different Globe touch points it worked with—one for digital, one for print and one for media. And none of those Globe representatives worked together, or even knew what the others were doing.

 

The only way for the Globe to grow revenue—or to even survive, really—was to create an organizational structure that would unify the sales function and build infrastructure in places where that sales function could flourish and drive growth. That way, you could make a real business case for more investment in a flourishing brand vs. simply caretaking it at a subsistence level.

 

It meant transforming the sales culture.

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You create collaboration and teamwork experiences that defy the eat-what-you-kill, high-turnover, you’re-disposable mentality. The goal is to build a sales team that uses all the assets at its disposal inside the organization to really determine what delivers value to potential clients. Not only does that provide more avenues for the sales team to be successful, but it also creates a powerful narrative for the executive team—one that there’s a significant cost to relentless turnover. There’s a cost to your customer relationships, and a cost when that intellectual property, so to speak, walks out the door.

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Does that mean members of a sales team don’t have to be accountable? Of course not. A critical part of the process is working together to establish what the overall organizational goals are, and how the compensation plans work to support those goals. When you build that together, every member of the sales team is (or should be) invested in their own future. Which means they’re accountable for their results.

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What does that look like in practice?

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I began a series of monthly meetings with the sales team that started with what I called the “fishbowl.” I started by asking each attendee to write down what he or she considered to be the one recent article that most impacted Boston-area readers and put it in a bowl. In another bowl, I had each salesperson’s name on an individual slip of paper. After collecting the ideas, I’d pull one from the bowl, pull the name of a salesperson from the other bowl and ask them to go through how they would communicate to their prospects the nuts and bolts of that impactful story and show the basic value of the Boston Globe providing that news to its readers.

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The first time I conducted this type of meeting, the first three people I pulled from the bowl hadn’t read the paper. I told the team I was going to discontinue the exercise that day because it was embarrassing—embarrassing that they didn’t know their product, and that they obviously wouldn’t be able to communicate its full value. I sent them back to their desks to read the paper—essentially, giving them an elementary-school reading assignment.

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Part of the point was to impress upon the sales team the importance of knowing the product. But the bigger influence was on the overall culture of the organization. Within an hour of that first meeting, the editor of the Globe came to my office and said he had never seen that kind of support from the business side in all his years at the paper—somebody who articulated the actual value of what the writers and editors did. After that, he became one of my biggest allies in the building. We’d meet informally once a week and talk about the business and what strategies could be effective to capture advertisers. It was for everybody to operate with full knowledge of the bigger picture. If a relationship with a potential advertiser could affect the integrity of the Globe, I wanted to know that so we could steer clear. If a we were thinking of a unique partnership that would cause a splash, it was good to know of any issues ahead of time, so we could maneuver appropriately on the sales side. 

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When an entrepreneur like Elon Musk builds a cutting-edge tech company from scratch, a kind of renegade, risk-taking, open-to-change attitude is built into the organization’s DNA almost by definition. There’s something very satisfying about coming into an organization that is the opposite of that and manifesting real change. The Boston Globe was the very definition of a legacy organization. It was scratching and clawing to stay alive in the face of marketplace shifts that were making its flagship product functionally obsolete. Add to that a staff that included many team members who had been at their jobs for 20 and 30 years and were fully entrenched in those legacy ways of doing business and it’s easy to see why so many traditional, multi-generational companies never escape that death spiral. In fact, a big part of my talent acquisition strategy at that time was to take risks on new team members who decidedly didn’t match the traditional Globe skill set. I pitched former college athletes and classically-trained musicians on the idea that they’d be coming in on the ground floor of the best business case study they could imagine, and they’d be getting a full immersion and hands-on responsibility that would supercharge their career development.

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I don’t want to make it sound like I’m laying blame at the feet of the 30-year member of the sales team who simply refused to move into the team-based setup we developed to spread knowledge and expertise across the digital and print platforms. The legacy system he was a part of featured a fill-in-the-blanks CRM tool that didn’t measure if a salesperson ever had an in-person conversation with his or her account—and many accounts hadn’t been maintained by a live conversation for more than two years. He wasn’t wrong when he pointed out that there was a new person in my chair every year or two, and historically, the new ideas I had were likely to go the same way as the last set.

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Organizations are overwhelmingly driven by short-term thinking. Boost the numbers for this quarter or this year to satisfy investors or the market. Worry about next year next year. Cut staffing by 20 percent a year after increasing by the same factor to “right size” the organization.

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But the most successful organizations do the exact opposite of that. Yes, you have to pay attention to the numbers and the near-term trends. But the best organizations are focusing most of their attention and resources on building for the long-term. They’re establishing trust and accountability internally, and operating with consistency and attention to detail.

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Could a consultant like McKinsey have come in and torn the Globe down to the studs to make it “profitable” as a digital-only play? I’m certain they could have. They’ve actually done that with organizations like Conde Nast. But that kind of action fundamentally does not produce what is the real accelerant for long-term health and growth. That kind of surgery does nothing to change, improve or rebuild an organization’s culture.

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Just look at what is happening in real time with Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Slashing half the workforce week one might address one of the fundamental problems with the business—notably, that it’s burning millions of dollars per day and revenue isn’t increasing. But what kind of environment does that create for the team members that stay? What are the long-term prospects for Twitter’s most-talented and most-productive team members? Is it more or less likely that they’ll stay? And what kind of future does a destabilized company that is losing its most valuable employees really have?

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At the Globe, we remade the sales team, and there was certainly a steady flow of turnover. But at the end of the journey, we transformed the Globe’s business from a print-first, dying legacy play to a dynamic digital-first, diversified media company. With new sponsored content marketing, interactive digital content and a modern approach to print advertising—which included (gasp) selling advertisements on the front page—revenue increased by almost $100 million.