Alastair Nash is among featured speakers who will bring especially astute messages to publishing from other, nearby sectors on Friday (14th November) in Europe’s busiest publishing conference, The FutureBook , at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster.
Bookings will close Tuesday the 11th, so hurry to secure your seat.
We are fond of pointing out that publishing is among the last industries to experience the special challenges of digital disruption. But we don’t always get around to adjacent industries that took it in the teeth before we did.
Sometimes, we pre-empt such efforts by telling ourselves that books are unlike anything else. No one understands publishing except publishers, nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen.
But when Alastair Nash speaks at the The FutureBook Conference (#FutureBook14) on Friday, 14th November, the “culture clash” he’ll be talking about isn’t between his sector and publishing but between an incumbent industry and start-ups.
You know very quickly that he has things to say to publishing when he starts by telling you, “A decade ago, [major telecom] operators controlled all of the proposition.”
“It can be quite a culture clash,” he tells me in a #PorterMeets live interview. “But in 2014 there is a huge amount of experience about how to make it work.”
Nash has more than 10 years’ experience in digital, telecoms and media. Starting his career at Peter Gabriel’s music download start-up, he later spent several years in consulting with Capgemini’s Telecoms & Media practice.
Most recently he led the Strategy & Communications team at Orange Digital, an agency owned by Orange.
And when it comes to major operators’ experiences with start-ups, he says, important lessons have been learned. This may sound good to struggling publishing start-ups that have found it hard to create collaborative partnerships with major houses.
Some have complained that necessary information wasn’t shared, others that the larger corporations didn’t allocate adequate staffing to their side of the equation.
Large companies, on the other hand, have complained that some start-ups’ personnel don’t know the business well enough to contribute meaningful innovation, and thus required too much time and developmental resources while being brought up to speed.
By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: #PorterMeets Alastair Nash: ‘Barriers falling’
Read the full post at: TheBookseller.com/futurebook
