Simplify the details
It would take too much space to fully
explain all the services Ascent Media has,
but one point of note is that its digital distribution, which handles, among other
things, everything done by Sony Pictures,
distributes about 50 terabytes a week.
That can lead to simple employee questions like, what’s a terabyte?
And even those who didn’t Google terabyte to learn that it’s equal to 1,000 gigabytes might not fully understand what role
digital files play in the future of the industry. This problem is not unique to Royo and
Ascent Media. Whenever your company is
doing something new or making a change,
people are often fuzzy on the details of
what tomorrow’s business tools and ideas
mean to them.
“Simplicity helps a lot, so it’s about how
you articulate a vision that is clear and
astute so everybody knows that this is
what we aspire to be,” he says. “Be clear
about what the vision is, collaborate
through the definition of that vision, and
then be clear on what the execution components are going to be and who’s going to
be doing what so there is a common sense
of purpose.”
Royo uses the example of sharing the
vision with his financial people.
“The first thing that we try to do is make
sure our finance people are subject matter
experts, meaning you want finance people
who are not just running numbers but who
understand the business, so as we engage
through these discussions, it’s not, ‘Well, all
of that is Greek to me,’” he says.
How do you make the elaborate easy to
understand? Take out the part that makes
it elaborate — new technology specifics,
high-end financial terms, anything that an
outsider wouldn’t understand, and make it
about how this is pushing the overall business goal.
“It’s not about technology, really,” Royo
says. “It’s about business, and how do we
have a healthy business going forward. So
you try to extract out all the acronyms and
the lingo about the technology and say,
‘OK, this is the service the customer needs;
these are the key components and requirements that come into being able to provide
that service.’ Strip all the technology sort of
noise out of that equation and make sure
that the business explanation and the business model that is put around any financial
decision is laid down to that simple vision.
So you force people to distill their ideas
away from the pure technology and into
the service definition and businesses that
we’re trying to service.”
HOW TO REACH: Ascent Media Corp., (310) 434-7000 or
www.ascentmedia.com
