I was shocked when I heard that Conde Nast was shuttering Gourmet Magazine after 68 years of operation. Gourmet had 900,000 subscribers, with total readership of approximately six million. Yes, advertising revenue was off 30%, but clearly Gourmet was a brand and franchise that was destined to morph into an Internet beehive of content, social sharing of travel and food tips, community, and close affinity. And they were on their way with 8,000 Facebook friends, 22,000 followers for editor Ruth Reichl on Twitter, and a YouTube channel. Gourmet could have and should have become the upscale Grand Dame sister of Epicurious.com, Conde Nast's successful recipe site. Why didn't the company get this?

Because much of Conde Nast is stuck in media meltdown.

It's all in a recent report from Forrester -- How To Rebuild The Media Industries. I've extracted the most important lessons for CEOs:

CEO Lesson One: Media companies must move through three stages. Stage One: digitization -- when their music, newspapers, books, magazines, TV shows begin to leave their traditional form and enter low-cost digital forms. The majority of media has passed through this stage. Stage Two: media meltdown -- when companies resist digital distribution, unsuccessfully try to reproduce their old analog business models in a digital world, and finally willy nilly liquidate their old assets in the hopes that their profit margins will rebound. That's the stage where Conde Nast finds itself. And then finally Stage Three: rebuild -- when CEOs figure out the new pricing models, understand that consumer convenience is the new imperative, let the market (not imperious editors and producers) decide what it will pay for and value, and move their companies forward.

CEO Lesson Two: Get your company through media meltdown as fast as possible. Rupert Murdoch is clearly not there yet -- he spent the week threatening to sue the BBC and Google for "...stealing content." You might be able to replicate your old model for a time, but, as the Forrester reports states, "...you do so under a sun that is gradually sinking on the horizon." The more time you spend in the meltdown stage, the fewer resources you'll have to work with during your recovery -- cf. Gourmet.

CEO Lesson Three: Use your leadership to prod, push, cajole your company into Stage Three. No, it won't be easy and you could very well lose your job in the process -- note that Reed Elsevier's Ian Smith left the company this week after spending nine months on the job. Your executives may only know the old way. Your board may only know the old way. You see lower operating margins ahead. You don't have a clear pricing model. But why wait around while Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and the Google guys feast on your carcass? Get out there and start innovating and moving at their speed. You have no choice.

Have you ever wondered what CEO's really want? Ever pondered on what you'd find in the CEO's head if you could take off the top of his or her skull and peer inside? Here's a short story and simple answers to those questions.

I have spent many years helping technologists in large companies communicate with executive management. Chief Information Officers often speak a different language than the CEO and commonly see the world through a different lens. As a way of signaling to the CEO that a new era of business-focused technology has arrived I have been advocating that the CIO change the term Information Technology (IT) to Business Technology (BT). It's a not-too-subtle way for the CIO to say, "Hey, I'm no longer the insular geek you've come to know and love through the years -- my team and I are about making money, not just tech."

But CIOs tell me they need more. They want to know what is in the CEO's mind so they can tune their message more precisely to that frequency.

To gather clues, you could read the annual report letters from CEOs. But they don't offer a clear answer. You'll get a lot of flowery language about, "Helping our customers through a pretty tough year…” or “Develop safe, fuel-efficient, high-quality new products” or corporate-wide re-invigoration...”

Yes it is true that seven themes recur -- numbers, organization, shareholder value, customers, innovation, brand, improving the world -- but that still feels too general and mushy...

So I'm about to let you in on a simple but powerful secret -- one they only reveal at Chief Executive School. CEOs think incessantly about only two things: 1) higher revenue, and 2) increasing profits. That's it. All of the rhetoric about productivity, or efficiency, or corporate responsibility can be directly linked to these two goals.

Why? Because in the long run, revenue and profit change governs the stock price. While in the short term, alluring strategic statements or charming executives can cause temporary share price spikes, you can't get sustainable valuation without driving the top and bottom line. In the 13 years I've spent running a public company, the intelligent investors I've worked with focus on these two metrics above all else.

So the next time you have to present to the CEO, remember to connect your tech project, or your new product idea, or your reorganization plan to revenue and profit increases. That's when the CEO's brain will light up and you'll be speaking his or her simple language. And don't tell them I let you in on the secret.

As a note, I presented these thoughts as a keynote at Forrester's Business Technology Leadership Forum held in Chicago on October 8th and 9th, 2009.

For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be writing about consulting, of the Enterprise 2.0 variety. For this I need all the help I can get: suggestions, tips, insights, case studies.

Here’s the idea: Enterprise 2.0 is a rage. C-suite execs are hearing non-stop that their competitiveness, agility, innovation, and ability to attract top brainpower hinge on their effective adoption of new social tools and practices. We all know the words. (We’ve written many of them ourselves.) Transparency. Break down the silos. Conversations. Market research on Twitter. Wikified research.

This boom is attracting hordes of consultants and software entrepreneurs. Many, no doubt, offer valuable advice. But it’s a new domain, very short on best practices and metrics. Who’s an expert? Opportunities abound for poseurs.

So, what’s going on? How can you spot a legit player? Is there any common advice that just doesn’t make sense for certain types of companies? Are there bogus metrics? (Twitter followers, perhaps?) Smart ones?

One more question: In Enterprise 2.0, where the community delivers intelligence, answers questions, and solves problems, shouldn’t much of this type of consulting be… free? Isn’t it weirdly old-school to pay thousands of dollars a day for this type of advice?

I could use all the suggestions you have. I’ll be carrying out the research on this blog, and publishing some of what I learn along the way. Thanks.

From a sustainability standpoint, it was like declaring a moonshot.

When Walmart recently announced that it will create an index detailing the full social and environmental impact of every product it sells, it highlighted one of the most vexing issues companies face today -- managing the many tradeoffs of creating "green" or sustainable products and services.

The challenge is to optimize each product or service for its total environmental and societal impact -- taking into account an intricate set of possible considerations and alternatives. Put simply, it's not good enough if water usage is reduced but waste disposal increases. And to be truly sustainable, a company must optimize offerings in a way that also maximizes business performance.

The implications of this are staggering. Imagine tracing the energy and water use, waste, labor standards, and carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions associated with every phase of every product a company makes or sells. That covers sourcing and delivering raw materials, development and manufacturing, packaging and delivery, consumer use, and reclamation and recycling at the end of life.

Fully understanding all the implications associated with sustainability requires a 360-degree perspective. And it entails massive collection of information not only inside a single company, but across hundreds or thousands of suppliers around the world. And it requires understanding the consequences of any decision to optimize a given process or component.

Three major factors are driving this level of introspection:
-- Key stakeholders such as customers, investors, business partners, and current and prospective employees are monitoring sustainability performance and factoring it into who they'll do business with, work for and buy from;

-- The costs associated with energy, water and waste are volatile and rising, so cutting consumption and improving efficiency are essential to the bottom line;

-- Government regulations on sustainability issues are becoming increasing stringent. Companies that fail to comply face growing financial penalties, restrictions on their business operations, and negative publicity.

While this trend has been emerging for quite awhile, a recent survey our company conducted with business leaders from around the world showed a couple things. First, most of them are unprepared to measure and improve their own sustainability. Second, they are unprepared to monitor suppliers for it as well.

For example, while many companies have ambitious goals to reduce CO2 emissions, in our survey only 19 percent were measuring them often enough to make changes to lower them. In fact, only 30 percent are collecting data frequently enough to make strategic decisions that address inefficiencies, environmental impact and risk across eight major categories – CO2, water, waste, energy, sustainable procurement, labor standards, product composition and product lifecycle.

Twenty-nine percent aren’t collecting any sustainability data at all from their supply chain partners. Eight in 10 aren’t collecting supplier data for CO2 and water, and six in 10 aren’t checking supplier data for labor standards.

How will companies achieve the levels of transparency, efficiency and social responsibility as prescribed by Walmart's sustainability index? As Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman said in his latest book “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” you can’t make anything greener unless you make it smarter – smarter materials, smarter designs, smarter software.

For example, in order for a company to reduce its carbon footprint, it needs to know where and how energy is consumed and CO2 is emitted throughout all phases of its operations – everything from datacenters, to office space, to manufacturing, to delivery -- as well as through every phase of its supply chain. Then it needs to determine where it can make reductions balanced against other environmental considerations and areas vital to overall performance, like cost, quality and service.

Taking such a comprehensive view can lead to some interesting – sometimes counterintuitive -- conclusions. For example, excess packaging has been a major focus when examining a product's environmental impact. Yet analysis of a shelf-stable, single-serving beef chili and beans product from food processor Truitt Brothers demonstrated that a little extra packaging actually helps reduce environmental impact. It keeps food losses below 4 percent, compared to typical food losses in the home of more than 15 percent. And it eliminates refrigeration in transportation, retail merchandising and home storage, reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Leading companies today are setting standards and measurements for themselves and their suppliers -- and even collaborating with competitors to set uniform industry specifications. They're deploying sensors and meters to collect and measure this data everywhere, and their suppliers are doing the same. They're implementing networks, analytics and dashboards that present that data in a way that lets them make better decisions to improve efficiency and lower emissions, and change business processes to put it all into action.

For many companies, this means rethinking every aspect of how they operate and who they do business with. But the long-term implications are clear -- businesses that do this effectively and proactively will meet the Walmart standard and thrive. Those that don't, will not.

For the past four years, I have been preaching the gospel of converting information technologists into businesspeople. I call this concept “moving from information technology to business technology — or IT to BT.”

At its core, I define BT as measuring your usage of technology with business metrics instead of technology metrics. The message is for IT to measure itself using business metrics that matter to the COO, CEO, and board of directors, instead of assessing its success with a technology yardstick, such as network availability or server uptime.

It’s not the mean time between failure or server response times that matter. If you change that one word from information technology to business technology, you begin to change the way IT people work and the way they think about their jobs.

Although this mental shift is happening slower than I figured, a generational change in IT and business leadership is beginning to force the issue. Now we’re seeing the older baby boomer generation beginning to retire, and for the first time, we’re getting CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who had an Apple II when they were 12. So now you have CEOs and presidents who are far more technology-focused. We’re no longer seeing so many people who are getting emails printed out — instead, these top execs actually read them. You know, business leaders actually use these IT devices today — maybe an iPhone or BlackBerry or Kindle —and now you have technologists who had an Apple II as a kid. Both groups of execs understand the evolution of technology out to people — technology populism, if you will — that we all have high-tech devices, and there’s now this new way of thinking and working.

Since the last technology recession from 2001 to 2003, CFOs have been looking more closely at IT spending, which accelerates the shift to BT. The overspend on technology in 2000 was so large — it was about $60 billion in the US — and that was the death knell of runaway technology expenditures. At that moment, CFOs and CEOs said, “We’re never doing that again. We’re going to have tight linkage here, higher return there.”

We’ll look back at this decade as a series of learning moments, and the real turning point from IT to BT is the two recessions, the customer moving clearly to the center stage because of the Internet, and the generational change in senior execs.

I’ll talk more about this at Forrester’s Business Technology Forum in a couple of weeks, but there are three questions companies should ask themselves before transitioning from IT to BT. First, you need to ask, “do we have the right CIO?” The CEO has to look in the eyes of the CIO and make the judgment “Is this person good enough to understand the business?”

Second, you should ask, “do we govern in the right way?” If the decision-making goes from the CEO to the CFO, or maybe to the COO and then to the CIO, I don’t think you’re ever going to get this IT-to-BT change to happen because the CIO is too far removed.

Third, you need to ask, “do we have the right business executives?” The onus is not just on the CIO; we need higher IQ in technology across all of the business executive levels.

If you answer “yes” to those three questions, then you have to ask, “how do we get there?” There’s no technology god that says you’ve got to be BT. The CEO and CIO have to go have a drink someplace, and they’ve got to say, “We’re not doing this right; let’s change our focus and make IT about the business.”

Word from NetSuite today is that it has released a pretty powerful application for the iPhone and iPod touch that more or less gives you the ability to do anything NetSuite does from your iPhone.

So what does it do? Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, and it tracks data from e-commerce sales, all of it running in the cloud, though in most cases, these are functions that would keep you at your desktop or notebook. If you’re already a NetSuite user you’re pretty much ready to go once you install the app on your device which becomes your go-anywhere NetSuite dashboard. And if your company has set up some custom data fields that are specific to your business, they come right into the iPhone.

And yes, it’s free, and all the features are covered in your NetSuite subscription fees.

Is there anything more boring than raw data? Yes, a blog that spews forth raw data. So I'll keep this short and sweet.

When CEOs doubt the importance of technology in the economy, I pull out a home grown aphorism: Technology is changing your customer, and your customer will change your company. In other words, whether you like it or not, demand will ultimately morph supply. And it's the job of the CEO to have a firm grasp of that dynamic.

So in the spirit of keeping CEOs up-to-date on the changing customer (like my 92 year old mother, shown here reading from a Kindle), here's a super-condensed summary of Forrester's recent survey of U.S. consumers. And I've also included short, pithy "What it means" comments. You can go here for a summary of the survey, or here for the BusinessWeek story about the report.

1) The 2009 customer is unrecognizable from the 1999 customer. What it means (WIM) to you: If your business looks the same now as it did in 1999, you are risking irrelevancy.

2) Consumers in every age group are quickly moving from offline channels to online. WIM: If your marketing department is filled with people that still over-emphasize TV or magazine advertising rather than a more balanced approach to the customer, you're wasting your money.

3) Americans spend 8 hours per week with old media (TV, newspapers) and 8 hours per week with new media (Internet). WIM: spending on your Web site and new media advertising should be comparable to your old media spend.

4) 25% of households have digital video recorders -- devices like Tivo that let TV watchers record shows and fast forward over ads. WIM: you're probably over-paying for TV ads.

5) 88% of people under the age of 40 are regular Internet users -- at home and at work. WIM: while all of your customers are changing, your future customers (young people) are changing even faster. Moving slowly now will inhibit market share and new customer acquisition over the next ten years.

6) Half of all Americans research products online before buying. WIM: your customers are ever smarter about what they purchase. All the more reason to treat them like partners and enlist them to help you design your next product.

7) Half of all U.S. adults play computer games. WIM: begin to use this medium, as IBM has done, as a training medium for your workforce.

Over the next ten years the move to digital will not abate -- it will intensify. As CEO, you must stay current with those outside revolutions and translate them into meaningful change within your company.

What do you think will be the most amazing change in the way that people use technology over the next 10 years? I'd love to get your thoughts.

A new survey from McKinsey & Co indicates that Web 2.0 technologies are spreading in corporations and producing all kinds of gains, from knowledge sharing to reducing communication costs.

I’m skeptical. It’s not that I don’t believe in the power of these tools. I do. But I don’t trust the answers execs put on the surveys. I think they feel pressure to say that they’re implementing new communications technologies, because to say the opposite looks backward. And of course they insist that they benefit from them, because to confess that they don’t would signal ineptitude.

In my experience, the technologies take root on the lower levels of the org chart (among people who can’t even imagine having a secretary). The efficiencies are real, and can even be transformational. But they’re hard to measure.

Top execs sprinkle in some Web 2.0 spending and, in many companies, receive hyped reports about tremendous gains in branding and efficiency. Everyone in the reporting chain has a stake in this upbeat line. The executives are much more likely to learn about one showcase example than dozens of smaller implementations that might actually produce greater results. (And many of them take place on technology not controlled by the company, from Twitter to Google Docs.)

In summary, execs are under pressure to green-light more of these projects. That’s a good thing. But to understand how these technologies are transforming the work place, talk to the people using them.

While 2009 has been an abysmal year for IT jobs, there are some indications that 2010 will be better. Once the economy starts to recover, hiring managers say they’ll staff up technology departments before other divisions, according to another survey released by Robert Half Technology and CareerBuilder on August 25. That data meshes with another recent survey by audit, tax, and advisory firm KPMG where two-thirds of senior technology executives said they thought their industry would fully recover from the current economic crisis ahead of the overall U.S. economy.

To see which sectors of tech are showing the highest demand for workers, check out our special report on tech jobs that we posted today. And, let me know if you’re seeing any early signs of recovery in the tech sector.

— Are dollars for IT starting to flow again? Do you expect the 2010 IT budget to increase, and by how much? Or will your company’s tech spending settle at a lower level than before the downturn began a year ago?

— What are the company’s spending priorities now, and what do you think they will be in 2010?

— Will cloud computing—essentially, the ability for company’s to tap into technology purchased the cloud service providers—enable you to cut overall tech spending? Or will you spend the same, but on different things than in the past?

— Will Windows 7 cause the company to buy more PCs? If so, will that happen this year, 2010, or after that? If not, why not?

— Will the Windows 7 PCs your company buys be similar to models purchased in the past, or will the company move to netbooks and other cheaper models?

— Does Windows 7 have capabilities that will drive other investment cycles—say, to higher speed 10 gig networks?

— Do you believe the tech sector is entering a new growth phase?

Please include the company name, and contact info here if you’re amenable to being contacted as he reports out his story.

A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble's former CEO (now Chairman), penned a Harvard Business Review article in May that nicely summarizes the job of CEO. Get your assistant to buy it, because you should read it.

Lafley argues that because CEOs don’t report to anyone within the organization, only they can truly advocate for customers and shareholders. As Lafley's guru Peter Drucker once said, “The CEO is the link between the Inside that is 'the organization' and the Outside of society, economy, technology, markets, and customers. Inside there are only costs. Results are only on the outside."

Lafley states it well: "The CEO can see opportunities that others don't see and, as the one person whose boss isn't another company employee, make the judgments and the tough calls others are unable to make."

The job of connecting the inside to the outside entails four activities, he writes:

• Defining in clear terms the nature of the outside; that is, identifying the target customers.
• Setting strategy. That means deciding what the company will do, and what it won’t.
• Balancing short term expenditures with long-term goals and ensuring the right trade-off.
• Setting and reinforcing the company’s values.

Lafley's concepts are highly germane, especially in the aftermath of the Gateway Recession. Fundamental changes will be coming for customers, market structures, media, and marketing. This will not be a time for CEOs to hunker down and stay internally focused.

Lafley's article is a call for the ultimate leader to get out of the office, shed old thinking, open himself to the impending societal revolution, and advocate for new ways of operating.

Or as Drucker states: "One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it. In a period of upheavals, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm."

Office vacancy rates are on the rise and by the second quarter of 2009, it increased to 23% globally, according to The Economist. That same report found that office vacancies in midtown New York City were approaching 10%.

So, what’s a company to do with all that extra space? Brightspark has come up with a way for companies to rent that space directly to others for short-term use. The company created a Web site called iStopOver that lets people rent excess business space such as cubicles, offices, meeting rooms, boardrooms, presentation centers, warehouses, studios and even parking spots. A furnished cubicle at an ad agency on East 24th Street, for example, rents for $650 per month. Although the site is up and running, the official launch date isn’t for a few weeks still. As such, the pickings are slim in some locations such as San Francisco where the only listing in the area is a dated office in Oakland for $50 per day. Presumably as more people hear about the site and decide to rent out office space, there will be more options from which to choose.

iStopOver also has a service for travelers who are looking to save money on hotels. Business travelers who are feeling particularly adventurous can rent a room in someone’s home at a big discount. For instance, a room in a New York City apartment is listed at only $60 per night. The hosts, Natalia, Judy and Yolandi, even offer to show travelers a night on the town.

While Twitter is now up and running again, it’s unclear what the motivation was for the attack. It is clear, though, that other companies frequently experience these Web attacks. “There’s a lot of denial of service attacks against big company Web sites that happen constantly,” says John Kindervag, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Kindervag says that Microsoft, for example, has faced its share of these attacks in the past because hackers have made the software provider a target. We often don’t hear about these attacks, he says, because there are ways to mitigate and defend against them. Sometimes a corporate Web site may simply slow down during such an attack but business can still be conducted, so consumers are not always aware of what’s happening.

Kindervag says it’s likely that a hacker activated a so-called botnet, an army of computers that have been compromised by malicious code. Once activated, these computers can be commanded to attack a particular Web service. Botnets can be rented fairly cheaply on underground Web sites. However, there have also been cases where groups of people have banded together to attack particular companies. “Groups of people getting upset with a particular corporation like a pharmaceutical company will band together and attack the site all at once,” says Dan Holden, product manager of IBM’s X-Force security research lab. In those cases, they are all given software tools that they all activate on their computers at the same time to initiate such an attack.

Still, experts say that it’s unlikely that the motivation for the Twitter attack was financial. Instead, they say it may just be some hacker who wants a little publicity and bragging rights in the hacker community.

It would stand to reason that if it isn’t safe for Marines to access social networking sites that it might not be a great idea for other branches of the military, either. So, just how much of a security threat are social networking sites? Experts at security vendor Sophos have noted that Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter have all experienced attacks during 2009 designed to compromise PCs or steal sensitive information. About 63% of 709 system administrators polled by Sophos in February 2009 worried that employees were sharing too much personal information on their social networking profiles and as a result putting sensitive corporate data at risk.

Criminals are also getting more sophisticated in using social media sites to spread malicious code, or malware. They use Twitter, for instance, to try to get people to click on bad links. “If a user clicks on a link in Twitter and installs malware on an enterprise PC, that’s bad,” says Patrik Runald, chief security advisor at F-Secure, a provider of online security services. The fear is that the malicious code will then give hackers a back door to enter a corporate or military network. In fact, the Sophos survey revealed that 21 percent of respondents had been the victim of targeted malware or phishing attacks, designed to get victims to reveal sensitive information. Security experts say that once malicious code is installed on a corporate network, it can be difficult to spot. In some cases, it can run undetected for months.

The Marine Corps order noted that social networking sites “in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries.” The order also noted that social networking sites expose unnecessary information to adversaries and gives them an easy conduit for information that puts operations security and communications security at an elevated risk for compromise.

If that’s the case, it would seem prudent for the Pentagon to quickly figure out just how much a hazard social networking is to military security. The U.S. is, after all, a nation at war.

If you're the typical CEO, you are carrying a BlackBerry. But not for long. Once the iPhone is able, in a corporate setting, to replicate all aspects of Outlook (email, calendar, notes, and tasks) with high security, the iPhone floodgates will open and you will have a new device. Here's why:

1) User interface. Despite the annoyance of the glass keyboard, the iPhone interface is faster, more intuitive, more flexible, and more versatile. You can do more, with more content, less instruction, and faster speed.

2) Applications. iPhone has a massive head start in the battle for applications. It's possible that your company already has an iPhone application in the market -- servicing your customers. Don't you wish you could see it? And there may already be applications available that will make your job easier -- I predict that corporate dashboards for CEOs will be a small but influential segment of the iPhone apps portfolio. In some markets, it's changing how customers connect to companies -- here's an example around mobile banking. The application revolution has begun -- and it's not on BlackBerry.

3) iPhone will soon be available from more cell services providers -- starting first in Europe. Once the device breaks out of its AT&T cage, the multiplier effect will kick in -- and the flood waters will rise fast.

Now there's a big "if" in all of this. Apple has been hostile to large corporate environments for years. Steve Jobs has famously called your CIO an "orifice" as in, "...we've never been good at going through the orifices to get to end users." Every time the company tries to leave the consumer and go enterprise, it goes from being cool to being incompetent. The company hates to take direction from anyone -- especially from large company CIOs.

But Apple may have to bend its corporate culture to grab the enterprise iPhone business -- the opportunity of moving iPhones into large companies will be too big and too lucrative to ignore. Once your company supports full Outlook replication to iPhones, many of your employees will dump their BlackBerries -- and your CIO will begin looking at how she can build some game-changing corporate applications for the Apple device.

After many years of watching tech revolutions unfold, I know that winners control two factors: 1) they effect a quantum jump in man/machine interface, and 2) they win massive applications support. Check and check with the iPhone. If Apple consents to change its strategy, an iPhone will be coming your way.