Leader Insights Series
About Nine Publishing
Nine is a leading Australian, publicly-listed media company, with holdings in radio and television broadcasting, newspaper publications and digital media. Its media assets include Nine Network, radio broadcaster Macquarie Media, subscription video platform Stan and majority investments in the Domain Group and CarAdvice. The Nine Publishing division covers major newspaper mastheads such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review, digital properties that include nine.com.au, 9Honey and Pedestrian.TV.
Given the Sydney Morning Herald is 188 years old (older than the New York Times) and The Age is 165 years old, we thought it would be interesting to learn more about how a CTO in a company with such heritage views leadership and the management of driving accelerated technology transformation.
How do you view disruption in the media industry?
Disruption can be a source of great creativity because you have a rare license to pursue opportunities and do things that other businesses would only dream of. One of the reasons I personally work in media is because media has no barriers to entry and it’s a low regulation environment. People external to Nine Publishing see it as ‘you’re a traditional publisher, you’re being disrupted’ but we see it as ‘no, the landscape is changing – how quickly can we change to be a disruptee?’ We don’t want to see ourselves as in competition with the ABC or News Ltd, we want to be in competition with the most nimble of media start-ups on the market, because that’s where the future competition is. So if you accept the idea that there’s a business with an existential threat and that technology is one of the potential things that could be exploited to save that business, then what greater is there than to contribute to that transformation as a technologist.
Through change we grow, through growth we learn, and through learning and discovery we realise a greater good, even if there are setbacks.
How do you lead your teams through periods of change and encourage them to embrace disruption?
The idea that change is a thing that starts and stops in 2019 is a poor mental model for change. Change is now a constant and a perpetual presence. So modern business, particularly in industries like media, is constantly shifting and being asked to embrace change. Change today is a very human problem, it’s not a technology problem. My personal approach to this is we just need to talk to staff on the level, consider their needs openly and be transparent about our motivations for the type of change and what we’re trying to achieve with it. Most people are incredibly resilient if they’re given the context and the thinking behind why we need to do something, or how we need to evolve or change direction. Growth mindsets are key as well. No-one’s expecting a faultless performance, but if you prepare your staff with fundamental tenets of resilience in the culture, and the sense that change is a constant - through change we grow, through growth we learn, and through learning and discovery we realise a greater good - then the authenticity of the communication carries people along with it, even if there are setbacks.
One of the more interesting things we’re looking at is an asynchronous publishing capability, where we can have multiple parties editing within the one article. This idea came out of one of our regular hackathons as an idea to allow multiple journalists and copy editors to work on the story in parallel.
How do you get your Board and Senior Business Executives to support technology led transformation?
I think a lot of boards and CEOs are now very open to the idea that technology can bring them something. At worst it can be very useful defensively, and at best it can actually be a real opportunity to compete or turn around or open up new markets, find new customers, or lower the cost of servicing different channels. Nine Publishing MD Chris Janz is a big supporter of the role that technology plays in the resurgence of a media business. I wouldn’t be here unless that was the case. Since I joined in 2016, that support has been fundamental and the Board and Chris were incredibly supportive that technology be a key pillar from which we would transform much of the publishing space. I think the challenge for technologists like me who work with Boards and senior business leaders is, how do you speak the language of the broader business? How do you reach a marketing person, how do you reach sales, how do you reach the editorial newsroom in a way that’s accessible for them, where you’re seen to be partnering with them and bringing the best of technology into the room to help them be successful or compete in the market. I think that’s the modern role of a CTO – being able to inject good business-driven technology outcomes into the discussion.
How do you view the difference between leading a team and managing a team?
The way I think about it, managing a team is a largely static landscape. You’re tasked with resources to deliver upon an outcome. In contrast leadership is about how you inspire and motivate your teams, to think and work in different ways to deliver upon challenges where the solutions are not always clear. Leadership is demonstrated and not appointed. Anyone can demonstrate effective leadership, in any role and at any level.
What’s your strength as a leader and where is your blind spot or leadership development area?
What made me successful early in my career has also been a blindspot. I ‘own’ a problem through to completion and have a strong bias for action. To chase down whatever is needed to ensure the project would be a success. Showing ‘ownership’ is a great thing. On the flipside, it can index as high on control, which in a leadership context is one of the more unhelpful qualities, when instead leaders need to ‘give responsibility, take accountability’. So, I have spent time in my career curbing my bias here and shaping it in a new direction by being comfortable with not exercising direct control.
How do you manage your Leadership blind spot?
An individual does not scale, and as the teams I’ve managed have grown, I’ve developed other skills to lead as I’ve moved away from being a single contributor. My focus now is on helping to set clear goals focused on a clear ‘why’ within the work. As a leader, it’s my role to ensure the team is clear on their mandate, and is properly resourced to get the job done. Gift them the opportunity and accountability to own their work. They often surprise me by solving problems in ways that I would never consider, and my role in that situation is to ensure that we stay focused on the ‘why’ in the work, and that I can ‘roadblock remove’ in support of the team, if necessary.
I have spent time in my career curbing my bias here and shaping it in a new direction by being comfortable with not exercising direct control.
What’s the most exciting thing you’re working on at the moment?
My team looks after a publishing platform for the major newsrooms that drives the Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. As the news cycle speeds up, there’s a lot of demand to do a lot more work in parallel, so one of the more interesting things we’re looking at is an asynchronous publishing capability, where we can have multiple parties editing within the one article. This idea came out of one of our regular hackathons as an idea to allow multiple journalists and copy editors to work on the story in parallel. It’s a good example of technological innovation that helps us meet the needs of a fast moving newsroom and innovate for our readers. Whilst the asynchronous editing is still in R&D, we relaunched the overall publishing platform in less than 12 months.
How do you prioritise your technology investments?
I say this often to my team: Writing code is probably one of the single most expensive things a technology-driven business can do. We should do it sparingly. This investment should be focused upon sources of our competitive advantage. Other factors that might be mission critical, but not necessarily fundamental to how you compete, can either be sourced through partnership or purchased. This is how we ensure we move quickly and deliver an efficient return on capital. So with cloud services, I probably could try and run my own cloud but it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. AWS abstracts away a whole set of concerns that 10 years ago, in my role, would have been a central focus; like capacity planning, physical resilience, patching, hardware lifecycles. That means I’m spending more time per week focusing on actual business value realisation – and to me, anything on the technology investment front that lets you focus more on what matters, is where you should be spending your technology investment.
Writing code is probably one of the single most expensive things a technology-driven business can do. We should do it sparingly
Is there someone who has been a strong leadership mentor to you?
I’ve had a handful of mentors who have been quite key. One in particular was Richard McLaren, who was the GM of ThoughtWorks in the UK but came out here and was CIO for NineMSN. What Richard taught me was how to sharpen my thinking around building highly effective engineering teams – that smaller, more compact teams with higher talent density, sense of ownership over their work and singular clarity over what’s asked of them, moving quickly, will always be the optimal way to deliver a high performance engineering outcome.
Is that how your teams work?
That’s how we operate now. We run fairly fluid cross-discipline squads that are no greater than eight to 10 people. Those teams have a singular product purpose and focus, and we try to give them a sense of accountability and direct control over their own outcomes, so there’s a clear measure on what we’re asking of that team, but not necessarily specificity over how they go about doing that. The team has some agency over how they solve those problems. In effect, finding that good cultural balance is an inversion of control.
Not everything works first time. What’s your favourite failure?
One of the first startups I ever worked with was a real estate portal to take on Domain and REA (from backers with deep pockets). It never really got traction because we brought nothing new to the market. We didn’t offer the audience or business any differentiation in terms of our products. We built a great team, great platform, just bad business strategy. It reminded me that doesn’t really matter how deep your pockets are in terms of startups, ultimately customers will weigh and value the substance of your idea. In contrasting that with my time at Stan, the strategy made sense, the execution came together and the marketing was great and it hit and found a segment of the market that it appealed to.
Do you have a book that has helped you improve as a Leader?
I have diverse tastes. One book that was recommended to me, although not a business book, is a great book on mindfulness called The Untethered Soul (by Michael Alan Singer). If you’re in the right head space it gives you a new appreciation for the practice of mindfulness and what really matters in terms of being able to challenge your thoughts and observe your thoughts, rather than just responding to them in a Pavlovian way. I find a lot of business books incredibly dry and could be summarised in a chapter or two instead of 500 pages, but books like this have been transformative for me and the way I think.