By Tracey Robinson-English

Media executives struggling to manage their careers and reinvent themselves for today's changing media climate need to present big ideas in the workplace, put them to work and adopt entrepreneurial traits as part of their personal strategy to succeed.

That's the counsel that Kellogg School of Management Professor Steve Rogers regularly gives media executives in Media Management Center programs. Rogers, director of the Larry and Carol Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice at Kellogg, is a successful entrepreneur himself and was named one of BusinessWeek's 14 "New Stars of Finance."

Rogers urges media executives to embrace innovation and take risks - like hiring younger and younger faces - even high school or college students - to create future products and think completely outside of the business.

"Who else is better able to talk about the future than young people? ...Don't limit yourself to the present product line," he said. "You have to give people complete freedom and don't say "No" to any ideas. Management is forbidden to say 'that idea is not part of our business.'"

For Rogers, the core traits of entrepreneurs are:

• Calculated risk-takers
• Opportunists
• Believe in using other people's money
• Willing to sacrifice in the short term
• Resilient
• Problem-solvers
• Optimists

Rogers also preaches the importance of something he calls "intrapreneurship" - entrepreneurial behavior within a corporate setting. Intrapreneurs are:

• Loyal to the company
• Visionaries
• Risk-takers
• Politic
• Tend to be good managers
• Accept being managed
• Profit-focused

"I talk a lot about entrepreneurial firms that informally allow new ideas to rise to the top and are receptive to them," Rogers said. "They create a culture for people to come forward and reward them for their ideas. Google is one of those companies. Companies that fail to do that often are left behind."

Rogers believes that one reason the news industry is suffering is that it was too focused on competition within the industry - and not focused enough on creating bold new ideas.

"My observation is that many media organizations thought about the future relative to their size in the existing industry. The effort has been to become the biggest newspaper or television company. The media industry did embrace dotcoms as another distribution channel like NBC.com. But, for the most part, all it did was embrace stuff that others did. They were following the leaders. It did not create anything new and diversify outside of its industry to buffer tough times.

"Where was their boldness?" he asks. "Where was the innovation? Has the industry looked at itself 20 years down the road and asked, ‘What are we going to look like? How do we find out? How do we get there?" It takes vision and a willingness to make it happen."

"I'm still waiting for a media company to take the idea of the watch gadget from the Jetson's cartoon and turn it into a one-stop source of information. Where's the craziness to step in front of the pack? It's not so far-fetched considering today's technology."

Rogers teaches in MMC's Advanced Executive Program and its NAB Management Development Seminar.

This article, by Tracey Robinson-English, is part of a series on experts who regularly teach in Media Management Center programs and/or work with MMC on cutting-edge research. Robinson-English, a Northwestern alum of Medill and the School of Communication, is a consultant to the Media Management Center.


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