When I asked people outside my company what they thought my role as a publisher and chief editor of a media company entailed, their answers were surprisingly basic to me: “You are the head of the newspaper.”

What? Well, yes, but it’s definitely not only that!

In their minds “the newspaper” meant I was only in charge of the print and Web editions, despite the fact they have consumed all our digital products, worked on publicity and hired projects with us, and participated in several of our events. How could their views still be so simple and far from reality — even within my board — when the Internet is old news and my team and I were so busy with too many projects to be innovative and sustainable on different platforms at the same time?

There are two key challenges media leadership face today:

1. The need to educate others on the complexity of our roles so that boards, advisors, and the public value and understand it. This allows them to better embrace their roles to nurture our leadership and companies in a smart way.
2. The need to concentrate our key and limited sources — our time and energy — in what really matters. We are very distracted, doing too much at the same time, often without hierarchy. This often leaves the strategy behind because what is urgent attracts all the attention.

I wanted to make a point using facts so I asked our innovation lab, ECOlab, to do two projects.

Project 1

I wanted to create a graphic mind map of all the services and products the newsroom was working under my leadership as chief editor so we could clearly show the level of commitment and complexity in today’s business. The purpose was for the team to better create the strategy with the company’s advisor.

After, I received a present from a dear friend: the book “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown. He proposes “living by design, not by default.”

Michael Porter says, “Strategy is about making choices and trade-offs. It’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” You can’t do this when your team is overwhelmed and unfocussed. “Essentialism” suggests the need to concentrate time and energy on our highest point of contribution: the right thing for the right reason at the right time.

Project 2

I wanted to create a list of all the points of any kind where we had contact with the audience. The purpose was to find out how many they were, evaluate them, and decide the action to take for each. Would we keep, redesign, monitor, or reframe?

• Keep: Medium to high impact for the brand, and the experience solves basic needs of the customer or value or surprises them.
• Redesign: Medium to high impact for the brand, but the experience doesn’t resolve the basic needs of the customer.
• Reframe: Low impact for the brand, and the experience doesn’t resolve the basic needs of the customer.
• Monitor: Low impact to the brand, but the experience solves the basic needs of the customer and creates value.

We created KPIs and criteria to evaluate each contact with our audience.

We found 124 forms of interaction with the audience. It was a number that surprised us because it was high considering the size of our company and the number of employees we had.

We were doing too many things at the same time. Some were key strategies, but others were draining our talent and even damaging our reputation. In fact, there were some that we didn’t know existed!

For example, there were things we were doing automatically, or they were being done by other areas of the company through the back office. For media companies that work with journalism, our most valuable asset is credibility, and some contacts we had were certainly harmful to our brand’s trust, even in small ways.

From the 124 points, we decided to:

• Keep 72.
• Redesign 42.
• Reframe six.
• Monitor (or kill?) four.

We were also able to decide in what order we wanted to work to smartly use our time and talent.

In the end, our graph provided a lot of helpful information.

Both projects helped us not only to explain to others what we do, but also how we see ourselves. As McKeown would say, we now know that instead of asking “What do I have to give up?” we can ask “Where should I go big?”

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