Evolving Excellence

New at Superfactory - November 2009

Each month new articles, book reviews, and other content are added to the Superfactory website. The new content is featured in the monthly e-newsletter which goes out to 50,000 subscribers worldwide, and we will also post a monthly heads-up on this blog.

New content in November includes:

The featured article is from regular contributor Bob Emiliani and is titled Free Money, Free Love.  The following is a brief excerpt, and you can read the entire article here.

Every Lean advocate is very enthusiastic about their work. But individual enthusiasm without extensive, high-level coordinated group activities to promote Lean management in policy circles will relegate Lean to a niche practice. We can do better than that.

What’s in a name?

In October 2007, the Lean Enterprise Institute held a celebration in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to commemorate its 10th anniversary. Jim Womack spoke at the beginning of the event and offered a wonderful retrospective of LEI’s beginnings, accomplishments, and future direction, which was to move beyond Lean tools and start to focus on Lean management (finally!). He also shared his regrets over the name “Lean,” saying that it was not a good name in hindsight but it is the name we have and should make the best of it. To me, he sounded nearly apologetic.

While Jim’s honesty was admirable, he should not have expressed any regret over the name “Lean.” Why? The long-view of history tells us that no matter what you call progressive management, executives will resist it or misinterpret and misapply it.

The featured book this month is Compression by Robert "Doc" Hall.  The following is a brief summary, click here for more information.

Strategic leaders of private and public organizations in the 21st century are faced with unprecedented challenges. The principles and practices that helped them compete and grow in the past, no longer work. Many of the problems are beyond complicated. They are problems generated by interlinked systems that prevent us from clearly defining the root cause. Their resolution requires reflection on the assumptions of the past and counter intuitive thinking.

Today, with Compression, Doc gives us a new perspective on the challenges of the 21st century. He gives strategic leaders a way to put their arms around the complex issues facing their companies, markets, and communities.

Gemba Academy has added a Quick Changeover (SMED) course to their Lean Package.  Take a look at how Gemba Academy is revolutionizing online training, on demand, in High Definition HD quality.

We continually update the other major sections of the website, including:

• PowerPoint Presentations: Over 50 downloadable PowerPoint presentations on lean manufacturing, quality, enterprise, and safety concepts.
• Factory Toolbox: Almost 300 downloadable forms, procedure templates, assessments, and tools to help you not reinvent the wheel.
• Events Calendar: a listing of lean excellence seminars, workshops, training, and conferences worldwide
• Topic Information: Summaries and resources on over 40 enterprise excellence topics.
• Virtual Factory Tours: Web and streaming video tours of over 100 factories.

For all you LinkedIn junkies, we have created a LinkedIn group for Superfactory, which now has over 3,500 members.  Join the group to  network with other Superfactory enthusiasts and to show our logo on your profile.  If you haven't explored LinkedIn, check it out to see why over 17 million professionals use it for networking.

We are always looking for new articles and other content.  Contact us via the Superfactory website if you would like to contribute to our knowledge base.

A Tale of Two Leans

by BILL WADDELL

There was about as good an article on lean in USA Today the other day as you will ever find in the popular media, describing a lot of good things happening on the factory floors at Sealy, Marlin Steel Wire, Dana, Carlisle Tire and ConMed.  The folks there are racking up all of the typical lean improvements - labor costs down, floor space saved, quality improved - all the things the lean community has been promising for a long time.

The gist of the article is that these companies have been dabbling with lean for a while, but when the economy cratered they got serious. "While a growing number of companies have adopted the practices through the years, the number of converts has grown substantially during the economic downturn," said a guy from Manufacturer's Alliance.  I have to wonder whether much of it is going to sustain once the economy comes back if the commitment to lean was driven by the need to immediately put out  fire that was burning out of control, rather than a genuine understanding that lean is a better way to manage the business. 

You never know who these folks really are and whether they really speak with authority, but the article said,  "Driving the lean movement is an urgent need to pare inventory, executives say. With revenue down and tight-fisted banks reluctant to lend, the makers no longer can afford to tie up hundreds of millions of dollars in raw materials that languish in factories for weeks or months."  If that's the case the likelihood of any of these companies becoming sustaining lean enterprises is pretty slim.  'The banks won't finance our waste any more so I guess we have to do this lean stuff' is hardly the sort of leadership required for excellence.

You never know, however.  It sounds like Marlin Steel Wire is the real deal.  They are a privately held company which ratchets up the probability of their management making sane decisions by orders of magnitude.  Their focus is on teamwork, quality, flexibility and hammering down lead times - all the right objectives.  See is they take the next step and structure themselves into true value streams, take on lean accounting and really become a lean enterprise and not just a lean manufacturer.  That will tell the tale of sustainability.

Lantech seems to be an excellent case in point.  They have done all of the factory stuff and the fluffy,cultural side of lean, but have a sustainability challenge.  They have all the characteristics of a company that is committed to lean, but has yet to realize that lean is first and foremost about management - not factory floor practices or culture.  With their passion for lean, however, odds are they will take the next big step.

Some of the others mentioned, such as Dana and Carlisle Tire, don't really have much hope.  They are tied to the automotive industry which begs the question, What took you so long?  Their copies of The Machine That Changed The World must have got lost in the mail twenty years ago.  Their lean effort seems to be aimed squarely at headcount reduction, which means that, now that their copy of the lean book arrived, they didn't understand it.

Sealy - the star of the story - is going to face some challenges.  They started their lean journey as a privately held company, then went public and they now have to answer to Wall Street.  It will be interesting to see how they weather the insatiable, anti-lean pressure.

I suppose stories like this one help the lean cause more than they hurt. The publicity is generally favorable, but when companies like Dana and Carlisle fail - and the odds are overwhelming that they will - it will feed ammunition to the the manufacturing naysayers.

The moral of the story is that there is lean ... and there is lean.  The same old story applies.  Some companies look lean and a few others truly are lean.  Of course the writer for USA Today cannot be faulted for not knowing the difference, but it is very important for manufacturing management to know the difference between what is going on at places like Marlin and Lantech, and what is passing for lean at Dana.

Once Upon A Time In Manufacturing

by BILL WADDELL

There are a lot of perks that come with being famous and powerful, one of them is that you can write a fairy tale with yourself as the hero and someone will publish it  Don Sessions from Calzone Case shared one such yarn with me. This one spun by Steven Rattner describes how, once upon a time a prince named Steven Rattner rode his white horse to Washington where he rounded up a troop of gallant knights on their white horses, then they all rode to Detroit to valiantly save two damsels in distress. General Motors and Chrysler.  Then Alexander Hamilton smiled down on them and everyone lived happily ever after.

True stories like - Once upon a time Joe and Vin Calzone set out "to build the highest quality custom case in the world, at a fair price with on-time delivery"; So they did it, building three factories, taking over the market, employing a lot of people, pumping a lot of good into three communities and making customers very happy along the way - don't get published in big time forums like Fortune Magazine bacause guys like Joe and Vin don't really have the right pedigree or the right connections.  Calzone Case mainly makes cases for musical instruments and Joe Calzone is a musician at heart - as are a lot of people who work for him.  How good they are is a matter of judgment. You can listen yourself to the company band (Fancy that - a company manufacturing products for the music market run by musicians who have a company band) called Trainwreck.

The fairy tale, on the other hand was written by the guy who "saved" the auto industry.  While the Calzone boys built a business based on the notion that their knowledge of and passion for music gave them some ideas about how to make products that would have a lot of value for musicians, the Prince who saved Detroit came from a little thinner background. Brown University , reporter for the New York Times (losing money and struggling to survive), Lehman Brothers (bankrupt), Morgan Stanley(well, what can we say about Morgan Stanely that hasn't been said before), Lazard Freres (lawsuits, investigations, sleaze...), and then founder of the Quandrangle Group (under investigation by the New York Attorney general).  Nothing in there about cars, manufacturing, or delivering an honest product for an honest price.

With this rather odd curricula vitae for a prince on a white horse to save the automobile industry, Mr Rattner describes how he first leaped into action by hiring a guy named Harry Wilson - a natural to get things going since Harry's mother had been ill treated in her manufacturing career, but Harry rose above it to get a degree from Harvard and made it big in the banking business.  So Harry was put in charge of hiring a gang of bankers and lawyers - a "mini investment bank" and a "mini law firm" - to get GM and Chrysler back on track.  Nobody who knew the first thing about the products or manufacturing was solicited - just a lot of people like our white knight - a 180 from the Calzone Case theory of business.

"The question for us was whether GM would be better off with Fritz [Fritz Henderson - GM CFO at the time and now the guy in charge] or with an outsider, as Ford (F, Fortune 500) had done in bringing in Boeing executive Alan Mulally. While nervous about whether Fritz could bring the change GM desperately needed, I was considerably more nervous about the likelihood of recruiting a thoroughbred CEO in the midst of the turmoil."

Heaven forbid the GM cultural boat get rocked; so rather than bring in anyone who knew something about cars or manufacturing, our white knight opted for the shrewd move of putting the current GM financial guy in charge.  Can't go wrong with a money guy at the helm, I suppose, especialy since the Prince and his fellow knights determined that GM's problem was purely a cost problem.  (There's a real surprise - a bunch of finace people got together and came to the stunning conculsion that GM's problems were financia!)

All of this is a long-winded exercise in preaching to the choir.  With all of the investment bankers, economists, regular bankers, McKinsey wizards and the assorted collection of America's best and brightest running GM into the ground, then bailing it out, and now scheming and planning absurd moves like buying back bankrupt Chinese manufacturer Delphi - all with billions of dollars in taxpayer money - they demonstrated an amazing ignorance of the obvious.

GM failed because their cars do not provide value to the people who buy cars - regular people.  So did Chrysler.  Toyota, Honda, Ford, Hyundai and others did not need bailouts and salvation by the likes of our financial experts because they make better products.

Click on this link and see the only data necessary to understand why GM went bankrupt, and why the government financial restructuring cannot possibly succeed.

It is hardly a coincidence that, if you were to list the car companies in order of best finacial performance to worst over recent years, the list would be in about the same order as the reliability rankings. It does not take great genius to know what Joe Calzone knows - you make money selling products that represent a good value to the customer - you lose money when you don't.  Even a wisp of that idea is nowhere to be found in the narration of the GM/Chrysler bailout project.  It is as if the product never crossed their minds.

The saddest part of all is that people like Rattner take well deserved, hard earned money from guys like the members of Trainwreck and put it in the hands of their financial community cronies - most of whom wouldn't know an honest dollar if they ever came across one.  He then has the gall to seek the blessing of Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton, author of the Report on Manufactures pointing out the critical nature of manufacturing to American success, and a driving influence to create the financial systems on Wall Street to provide capital for manufacturing would not "have been proud of you", Mr Rattner, your self-serving version of events notwithstanding. 

I suspect he just might have enjoyed tapping his toe to Trainwreck, however.  

Ritz-Carlton's Focus on the Customer

By Kevin Meyer

We've often heard about the incredible customer focus at Ritz-Carlton hotels.  Now a Forbes interview with RC president Simon Cooper sheds some more light on the subject.

Ritz-Carlton has become a leading brand in luxury lodging by rigorously adhering to its own standards. It is the only service company in America that has won the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award twice, and Training Magazine has called it the best company in the nation for employee training. Its unique culture starts with a motto: "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen."

So what kinds of unique things do they do?

We entrust every single Ritz-Carlton staff member, without approval from their general manager, to spend up to $2,000 on a guest. And that's not per year. It's per incident. When you say up to $2,000, suddenly somebody says, wow, this isn't just about rebating a movie because your room was late, this is a really meaningful amount. It doesn't get used much, but it displays a deep trust in our staff's judgment. Frankly, they could go over that amount, with the general manager's permission.

The concept is to do something, to create an absolutely wonderful stay for a guest. Significantly, there is no assumption that it's because there is a problem. It could be that someone finds out it's a guest's birthday, and the next thing you know there's champagne and cake in the room. A lot of the stuff that crosses my desk is not that they overcame a problem but that they used their $2,000 to create an outstanding experience.

There are stories about hiring a carpenter to build a shoe tree for a guest; a laundry manager who couldn't get the stain out of a dress after trying twice flying up from Puerto Rico to New York to return the dress personally; or when in Dubai a waiter overheard a gentleman musing with his wife, who was in a wheelchair, that it was a shame he couldn't get her down to the beach. The waiter told maintenance, who passed word, and the next afternoon there was a wooden walkway down the beach to a tent that was set up for them to have dinner in. That's not out of the ordinary, and the general manager didn't know about it until it was built.

Pretty incredible.  Meanwhile how many of us have spending limits, even as experienced managers and executives, that preclude us from creating exceptional service.  I often joke with my CFO that our shop floor operators have more financial authority than the company President as they can make $40,000 accept/reject decisions every day without any oversight, and we trust them completely, but our executives require multiple approvals for far less.

How about the concept of stand up morning meetings:

We use what we call "lineup," which is a Ritz-Carlton tradition. The concept comes from the early restaurants of France, where the chef got his whole team and all the waiters and waitresses and the maitre d' together at 5:30 in the evening. It's a sort of round table. Everybody is there. The chef communicates what they are going to be serving. For the Ritz-Carlton, we want every single hotel, everywhere in the world, every partner, every shift, to utilize lineup, which typically takes around 15 minutes every day. Part of the lineup everywhere around the world is a "wow story," which means talking about great things that our ladies and gentlemen have done. That is a wonderful training and communication tool, where every department layers on the department message. And it's based on having the same message everywhere, every day, and then each hotel layers on its own message.

Not only are issues and policies discussed and aligned, but successes are celebrated.  That's a lesson and reminder for many of us who already have stand up meetings.

Finally, what is the key to their successful customer-centric culture?

A culture is built on trust. And if leadership doesn't live the values that it requires of the organization, that is the swiftest way to undermine the culture. No culture sticks if it's not lived at the highest levels of the organization. It takes an extraordinarily long time to build a culture.

Hear hear.  Trust, driven from the top.

Finally, does anyone want to sponsor me to stay at a Ritz for a few days so I can investigate in more detail?  I promise a great post will follow!

The Status Quo Degrades

By Kevin Meyer

Stewart Anderson penned an article in the latest Quality Digest that took a look at several misconceptions about Toyota.  I won't go into all of them, but one in particular did stick out:

Misconception #4: Toyota processes are fully standardized and never degrade.

Standard work is a key component of lean manufacturing, so what does that mean?

While Toyota does believe in and practice creating standardized processes, they also realize that even a standardized process will degrade over time. This happens for a variety of reasons—people forget to follow standardized work, standard operating conditions deteriorate over time, etc.

So if that's the case, then how do you control it?

Thus, Toyota takes the view that if a process is not improving, then it is degrading; there is no in-between state that can be indefinitely maintained, even with standardization in place. Because all processes will degrade, Toyota always insists on moving toward the next target condition once a previously-set target condition has been achieved and the new condition stabilized.

Toyota managers will always restandardize a process after every improvement, but they will not be content to rest there, since they know the new condition will deteriorate unless daily improvements are made.

If it's not improving, it's degrading.  Period.

Sort of makes you wonder about those factories that became "lights out" operations filled with robots.  Since robots can't really dream up improvements, what will happen?

Masking the Real Problem

By Kevin Meyer

I promise to get off of this tax kick one of these days, but ignorance of the incredible influence of tax policy just burns me sometimes.  And here in California it just hit again, effective today.

What would you do if your customer came to you and said they'd like a loan of 10% of what you planned on paying them for real goods and services, beginning immediately and revolving perpetually, and they'd then pay it back the following year with no interest?  In effect asking you to for more cash that you then would not have available to purchase, or invest in, other essentials.  What if you had no choice.

That's exactly what happened. Our state withholding just went up 10% today, but it will then just be refunded after we file returns next April.  So they claim it's not a "tax increase" since over the course of the year it will balance out.  This myopic travesty will bring in an extra $1.7 billion, which will then have to be paid right back out (assuming they don't start issuing IOU's again).  And as with all government programs, there's no end point... next year I'll be giving them an extra 10% loan to be repaid the following year.

What would happen if you told your boss you needed to pull a few million from the corporate treasury to apply to your bottom profit line, but with the promise you would then return it the following year... when you'd ask for it again.  Would anyone believe you really had higher profits?  Would you still have a job?  Would your margin problem ever be really fixed?  

That's really the bottom line: it doesn't fix anything.  Just a mask.

The accounting games politicians play.  And they claim businesses are corrupt?

Knowledge - and Revenue - Runs Away

By Kevin Meyer

A couple times a year I touch on the admittedly touchy subject of how tax policy literally attacks knowledge - and thereby revenue.  It continues to boggle my mind that some people believe you can continue to increase taxes on the successful without suffering consequences.  A story just the other day reinforced the oft-ignored reality.

New Yorkers are fleeing the state and city in alarming numbers -- and costing a fortune in lost tax dollars, a new study shows. More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.

The impact?

"The Empire State is being drained of an invaluable resource -- people," the report said.

Bye bye knowledge.  And what do knowledge workers have in common?  They pay taxes.  So...

It all adds up to staggering loss in taxable income. During 2006-2007, the "migration flow" out of New York to other states amounted to a loss of $4.3 billion.

New York isn't the only state hit hard.

High-tax California is experiencing the same refugee problem. According to Census figures, from April 2000 through June 2008, California lost a net 1.4 million people to domestic migration. The departees are not our welfare kings and queens. They are the young, the educated, the productive, the ambitious and the wealthy.

Where's everyone going?  The low tax states like Florida and Georgia.  Where are companies moving to take advantage of those pools of knowledge?  You guessed it.  Which states are then benefiting with more overall tax revenue even with lower tax rates?  Yep, right again.

We've seen the effect between states.  What will happen globally now that many countries, notably in eastern Europe, are lowering individual and corporate taxes while some of the developed world are raising them?

You may laugh at Laffer but Laffer may have the last laugh.

Move Over Barney, Meet the Imagination Movers

In this age of mindless moronic children's entertainment, there is a bit of a breath of fresh air.  A hat tip to Dawn in Michigan for helping us meet the Imagination Movers.

Based largely on the original concept created by the Movers themselves in 2003, Disney Channel debuted a new television series in 2008 featuring Rich, Scott, Dave and Smitty as blue-collar brainstormers working hard to solve “Idea Emergencies” in their Idea Warehouse, a clearinghouse of infinite inspirations. Through songs, stories and hijinks, Imagination Movers moves kids to exercise their bodies and brains.

Movers motto for everything in life is to “reach high, think big, work hard and have fun!” The Movers themselves are leading by example as they captivate new fans daily with their winning sound and style.

Check out one of their tunes on brainstorming.

Not too shabby for kids.  Might be a good idea for some of our more intransigent organizations as well...

Circling the Wagons Of Ignorance

by BILL WADDELL

Just because the people you choose to surround yourself with agree with you does not mean you are right.  I have stated before that great minds might think alike, but raving lunatics often see eye to eye with each other too.  There is no shortage of evidence to support that statement.  As many as ten minds wallowing adjacent to each other in the foulest part of the sewers of California thought alike and proceeded to gang rape a little girl over the weekend.  That in itself proves that thinking alike is hardly proof of correctness, let alone greatness.

The crux of the scientific method is to form a hypothesis and then go out and look for something that can disprove it.  The scientists and logic folks would say that only when you have given it an honest effort to prove yourself wrong  - your idea passes every experiment you can devise - no peer or expert can refute you - are you onto something.

We are surrounded with examples of failure resulting from inbreeding - people and organizations that cloister themselves in order to assure that no one will ever disagree with them.  Their theories do not undergo anything like the scientific method.  They are like the three college kids in Connecticut who tied the doors to a few dorm rooms shut, then loaded the dorm microwaves with popcorn and set them to cook so long the smoke alarms would go off. Driving their buddies wild with panic when they found themselves trapped in what they thought was a burning building was the apparent goal.  There is not much doubt that, had they run the plan past just about anyone who was at home, in bed, sober at 3 AM when the scheme was hatched, they would have heard a well reasoned contrary opinion to their brilliant idea. 

The failing media outlets Kevin wrote about are in trouble largely because they are out of touch with their customers, and they are out of touch because they have set their own thinking up as the gold standard and do not air or print anything that contradicts them.  They no more want to hear contrary opinions than those college kids wanted to hear what their parents would have thought about their popcorn plan.  So they continue on the same intellectual path - getting validation from each other and wholesale rejection from their customers outside the circle.

Same goes for our egg-headed friends over at Harvard as they engage each other in another silly debate over the nuances of their silly theories concerning manufacturing, innovation and the flatness of the earth.  They have a closed circle politely debating shades of agreement, but they are not the least bit interested in having anyone from outside the club refute their theories.  Some guy named Yoffie says we don't need manufacturing because Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com can carry the economy.  Let some hayseed with a 2.8 in management from Kansas State try to jump into the fray with a comment telling the good professor that those companies employ a total of 34,000 people to get $38 billion in sales, while Whirlpool has twice the people and half the sales - and Whirlpool outsources everything it can get its hands on.  His theory has a great big gaping hole - manufacturng creates jobs - information for services doesn't.  The naysayer from the flatlands won't get far because their beautiful theories cannot stand outside scrutiny.  The Harvard Club are not the least interested in facts that run contrary to their thinking, so they close the doors and limit membership to people who they can count on for validation.

This is really not much different from the push back I occasionally get on my One Day Assessments when I urge a reconfiguration to Value Streams, or a conversion to Lean Accounting.  It seems that lean only applies to Japanese owned car companies with factories in Scott County, Kentucky - everyone else is different.  Because I am not from around there I cannot possibly understand the culture that makes lean impossible in their plant; and I am not from their industry so I simply do not understand that they are unique and what works for everyone else just doesn't fit their business model.  I often feel about as welcome as mom and dad saying, 'you guys really don't want to put that popcorn in the dorm microwave and tie all the doors shut'.  It leaves me scratching my head at those companies willing to pay me good money to come in, agree with every recommendation and observation I make, then tell me they aren't going to do any of it because it just won't work in their situation.

This unwillingness to even listen to differing opinions often happens when the boss has a very fragile ego - and it is amazing how many such insecure bosses there are.  The criteria in many companies to get ahead is agreement with the boss.  No contrary facts or opinions are tolerated. The culture of the 'yes man' is still alive and well in many companies and it is a huge barrier to improvement.  To make matters worse, lcokstep agreement with the boss' views is often seen as a measure of teamwork - disagree with the boss or introduce a new idea and you are not a team player.  This is the actual impetus for many, many of the One Day Assessment calls I get.  The boss doesn't really want my opinion any more than he wanst anyone else's - he wants me there for 'outside validation' of the opinions he has already formed. What a waste of my time and the company's money!

When I go out on one of my assessments and the company is not doing well, I can almost count on running into an internally focused management team that is long on why thinking other than their's is unwelcome.  At the other end of the scale, I occasionally get called into companies that are doing very well.  They are those rare companies that not only accept but actively solicit outside challenges to their thinking.  Those are the excellent few.  They are engaged in a scientific method of sorts - not content that they have the right answer as long as there is a chance something better might be out there.

An organization cannot improve unless it is a learning organization, and a learning organization is continually generating new thinking and is willing to have open and honest challenges from every corner - especially from ideas coming from outside of the inner circle.  Inbred thinking only leads to five legged cattle, failed newspapers, irrelevant college professors, burnt popcorn and bankrupt companies.

When Is It Time To Change Direction?

By Kevin Meyer

Two different articles both appearing yesterday and discussing obliquely-similar industries got me to wondering about business models and commitment to those models.  How long should an organization stay committed to a model?  When should it change?  What should trigger change?  The meat of the articles is nothing new and simply part of a long-term trend, but the data supporting the trend was just updated.

First off, the Wall Street Journal reported the latest figures on U.S. newspaper circulation.

Average weekday newspaper circulation for the six months ended Sept. 30 dropped nearly 11%, the starkest decline in years anda sign of both the industry's deepening troubles and its efforts to purposely pare unprofitable copies.  Nearly two-thirds of the 25 largest papers in the U.S. posted circulation declines of 10% or more.

Wall Street Journal	2,024,269	+0.61%
USA Today	1,900,116	-17.15%
New York Times	927,851	-7.28%
Los Angeles Times	657,467	-11.05%
Washington Post	582,844	-6.40

The guys at the WSJ were probably more than happy to print this data; after all their circulation actually increased and pushed the paper into the number one spot in terms of gross circulation.

Coincidentally The New York Times reported on prime time cable news show ratings.

CNN, which invented the cable news network more than two decades ago, will hit a new competitive low with its prime-time programs in October, finishing fourth – and last – among the cable news networks with the audience that all the networks rely on for their advertising.

Fox News	Bill O'Reilly	881,000
Fox News	Sean Hannity	659,000
Fox News	Greta Van Susteren	538,000
Fox News	Shepard Smith	465,000
MSNBC	Keith Olbermann	295,000
MSNBC	Rachel Maddow	242,000
CNN	Larry King	224,000
CNN	Anderson Cooper	211,000

With the exception of the sharp fall by CNN, these numbers have been relatively steady over the past couple years.  CNN did try to create some positive spin.

CNN executives emphasized that the network continues to draw more viewers than all its competitors except Fox News when all hours of the day are counted.

So now for my question.  If your circulation or prime time programming is falling, what do you do?  Do you stick with the original model, perhaps decades old, or change it?  If the old model represents a fundamental philosophy, a seemingly moral obligation to report instead of profit, how long do you hold out?  Altruism only lasts so long.  If you stay true to your beliefs and your passion, is it enough?

Doesn't look like it.  So then what?

To be fair, both media industries are trying.  The print guys are moving to a focus on niches and paid circulation models.

Publishers say they are concerned less about the total number of copies they distribute than with reaching a smaller but more select audience for the printed newspaper. They say this strategy makes the newspaper more attractive to advertisers and helps publishers generate more revenue for each copy sold.  The Journal also was helped by sales of paid online subscriptions, which few newspapers offer.

The WSJ is pretty much the only paper that has made the paid online model work.  On the television news side of things, Fox has led the pack for many years with the shift to primetime opinion shows after hard news during the day.  Perhaps the inability of other outlets to understand this shift is analogous to why some still complain that O'Reilly and such aren't news.  Even Fox doesn't claim they are and calls them opinion shows.

So what about you?  Are you taking the altruistic path and holding onto something unsustainable?  Or changing and experimenting?