Why do businesses fail? It was much easier to answer this question in the post-Internet era when there weren’t too many factors influencing business decisions. With technology evolving rapidly and impacting each and every aspect of business, it’s getting very difficult to pinpoint a specific phenomenon. Economists and analysts have often reached the same conclusions, using different entry points to determine the causes behind the uprooting of both traditional and new-age companies. Although it’s difficult to decide between the rights and the wrongs, what these studies provide is a new perspective on why some models have become a raging success, while other similar ones have languished in different conditions.
Bharat Anand, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, analyses the success of businesses in the midst of what he describes as ‘digital fires’. His book, Content Trap, lays down how companies are falling into a fallacious argument of valuing content over everything else, ignoring the value of connections, be it user, product or function. Anand points out that they often commit the mistake of believing that there are only two options left for them: to leave the forest burning or to fight the fire. He believes that some companies get themselves too embroiled in the debate over product, quality and content—they get into what he describes as ‘content trap’. He portrays this well, using examples from the traditional media industry, online news websites, TV and the advertising world.
The book even sheds light on the idea of education, using the case study of HBX, Harvard’s online education platform. Anand, however, makes it clear that his objective is not to identify black swan events, but to shed light on the failure and success of companies in the ever-changing age of the Internet.
Anand has divided the book into three parts, with each focusing on different types of connections. He doesn’t, however, bore the reader with the complexity of models and equations. Anand instead uses examples from The New York Times, Schibsted and Kaun Banega Crorepati to keep readers engaged. There are also enough analogies, as well as anecdotes in the book to entertain the reader.
More importantly, the author has kept the chapters brief and concise, so as to not muddle the reader with too many words or instances. Each chapter is designed in the form of a lecture. Much like management courses, one can draw many inferences from his analysis and Anand, though over-emphasising at times, doesn’t always impose his thought, leaving some room for the reader to decide.
Where the book falters, though, is in the cogency of arguments. Anand does well to uncover each of the case studies, but doesn’t connect one to the other to make an industry analysis. Also, given the abundance of examples and different models from each industry, the reader would feel as if something is amiss. As for the HBX study, nowhere does the book describe the success of the model or how connections have impacted the workings of the new-age educational platform. Instead, what one gets are fragmented pieces of how the model has worked. Drawing the content trap argument a bit too far, the book falters on assuming that others can’t replicate the success to draw on a larger share of the market. This is where Anand doesn’t differentiate between the new and the old.
There is still much to learn, though, from the book and Anand does well to provide a new perspective to things. For start-ups wanting to learn survival skills in today’s world, Anand’s analysis and detailed case studies can be as good a guide as any.
