1. Practical Approaches
to Change and its
Impact on People
Jabin White
Director of Strategic
Content
Wolters Kluwer Health
May 6, 2010

2. Agenda
 Introduction
 What does all this change mean to me?
 Lessons from Changeville (via a case study), and how
to know when you can‘t turn back
 Closing Thoughts
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 2

3. Introduction: Who Am I?
 Director of Strategic Content for Wolters Kluwer
Health – Professional & Education
— Responsible for making sure content flows through company more
efficiently (DTDs, Content Management, Authoring Tools, Semantic
Enrichment, Product Information Management, etc.)
 Wolters Kluwer Health includes:
— Lippincott Williams & Wilkins titles
— Ovid
— UpToDate
— Provation Order Sets
— Drug Facts & Comparisons
— Medi-Span
— Clin-eguide
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 3

4. Baseline Assumption: The World of
Publishing is Changing, Get Over It
 Understand that change = opportunity
 Control change – ie, change for the better, not for the
sake of change
— A subtle difference, but a critical one. Realize that your business
fundamentals can remain the same in the time of great change.
 Understand that an environment that tolerates failure
is critical to change and growth
 So what does all this mean to me?
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 4

5. Change is inevitable – except from a vending machine.
- Robert Gallagher
WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN TO
ME?
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6. Impact on Different Groups
 Editorial/Product Management
— ―Getting close to customer‖ is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity
 Production
— Probably biggest impact, innovation while keeping the store running, and
―last link in the chain‖ problem gets worse
 Sales & Marketing
— Opportunity for super value if close enough to customer; figuring out
how to sell less to more; business model flexibility
 Executive Suite
— Patience in a time of impatience; stomach for infrastructure, promoting
an atmosphere that tolerates mistakes
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 6

7. Why do we think failure is bad?
 Because society tells us so?
 Many companies create an environment wherein
failure is unacceptable
 Studies show failure as a learning experience is
incredibly more effective than success
 Sports psychology has something to say about this
 Obviously we don‘t want to encourage failure, but
promote acceptance/recognition of it, and learning
from it
— ―I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.‖
— ―I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that
precedes what the world calls success. ―
 Thomas Edison
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8. What The Experts Say
 Peter Drucker: ―The 9-month memo‖
 Jim Collins: ―Extreme personal humility with intense
professional will‖
— A different sort of leader: singles and doubles instead of home
runs
 George Eliot: ―Life is like playing chess with each
piece having thoughts, feelings, and motives of their
own. It is complex beyond reckoning‖
 Every move, every decision, is a partial failure, to be
corrected by the next one (even walking)
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 8

9. ―The reasonable man conforms himself to the world. The
unreasonable man conforms the world to himself. Therefore, all
change depends upon the unreasonable man.‖
George Bernard Shaw
PRACTICAL LESSONS ON
CHANGE, VIA CASE STUDY
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10. Case Study – The Background
 STM Publisher in the late 1990s
 SGML was a known thing, decent penetration in
journals, and XML was being developed
 Business case for providing journal files in SGML was
getting to be a ―slam dunk,‖ but *how* exactly that
was accomplished was still being figured out
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 10

11. Case Study: Change Before Its Time?
 Built a DTD** for journals
 Built a DTD** Suite for books
— Both used by compositors for post-print conversion
 Started building Editing Tools that were SGML aware
 Upper Management was on board, and realized the
long-term savings of producing data once and using
multiple times
**DTD = Document Type Definition, the ―road map‖ of an SGML/XML document
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 12

12. Case Study: Change Before Its Time?
 Built a DTD** for journals
 Built a DTD** Suite for books
— Both used by compositors for post-print conversion
 Started building Editing Tools that were SGML aware
 Upper Management was on board, and realized the
long-term savings of producing data once and using
multiple times
Or so I thought!
**DTD = Document Type Definition, the ―road map‖ of an SGML/XML document
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 13

13. Case Study: What Went Wrong?
 Upper Management changed, as it sometimes does
 Middle Management not engaged properly (we learned
this later)
 DTDs were too ―hard‖ to work with, the editing tools
added time to copyeditors‘ workflow
— Result: Tools abandoned, DTDs put in a drawer
 DTDs continued to be used for journals, but a ―mixed
bag‖ for books
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 14

14. Case Study: Post Mortem
 Knowing the difference between real commitment
and ‗lip service‘ is a critical skill for change agents
 Knowing *when* to change is as important as knowing
*how* to change
 Must tie the *reasons* for change to the causes of pain
in people‘s minds – we were trying to solve a problem
that people didn‘t realize they had
 My ―20-60-20 Rule,‖ learned the hard way
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 15

15. Where to Focus?
The ―Early Adopter‖
• Sure, I get it. Tell me what to do! 20%
The ―No Way, Jose‖
• A no looking for a question to 20%
answer
The Middle
• I may be willing, but show me 60%
•A really unfortunate note: People aren‘t always what they seem, and they
don‘t always stay in their respective boxes
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 16

16. Where to Focus?
The ―Early Adopter‖
• Sure, I get it. Tell me what to do! 20%
The ―No Way, Jose‖
• A no looking for a question to 20%
answer
The Middle
• I may be willing, but show me 60%
•A really unfortunate note: People aren‘t always what they seem, and they
don‘t always stay in their respective boxes
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 17

17. Where to Focus?
The ―Early Adopter‖
• Sure, I get it. Tell me what to do! 20%
The ―No Way, Jose‖
• A no looking for a question to 20%
answer
The Middle
• I may be willing, but show me 60%
•A really unfortunate note: People aren‘t always what they seem, and they
don‘t always stay in their respective boxes
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 18

18. Case Study: A Happy Ending?
 I‘m back, baby!
 The book DTDs were maintained, and they are now
being put to excellent use
 The world has moved forward in its embrace of XML
(a rising tide lifts all angle brackets?), so the power of
these DTDs is ready to be unleashed
 That doesn‘t make what we did in 1999 right; it
makes us lucky
— If you predict your baseball team is going to win the World
Series every year, it doesn‘t make you a genius the year that
they do  (See White, Jabin. The 2004 Red Sox)
 Everything new becomes old, then maybe new again
(if you wait long enough)
— This also explains my wardrobe
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 19

19. How To Know There‘s No Turning Back
1. From an XML perspective: when you‘re scratching
your head thinking: ―Why am I paying to do
essentially the same thing twice?‖
2. From a cultural perspective: when you realize you
are asking people to do things you have no
confidence in their ability to do
3. From a systems/tools perspective: when you
cannot support said people with the systems
necessary to do what they need to do
4. From a product development perspective: when
your infrastructure is preventing you from doing the
things you want to do (I feel your pain!)
5. From a customer perspective: when they are
asking for things you can‘t provide (see No. 3
above), or when delivering these things cannot be
done in a cost-effective way
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 20

20. AND NOW, BACK ON MY
SOAPBOX
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21. Impact on People
 Not everyone will adapt, but they should be given the
chance
 Just because we have to be ―experts‖ at technology
doesn‘t mean we still don‘t need editorial expertise
— Publishing is still part art, part science
 Technology is an ―enabler‖ of what we do, not a
replacement
 The way some technology companies talk about
content and its importance, it‘s a good thing I‘m a
pacifist 
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 22

22. Closing Thoughts
 There *is* no turning back
 It is no longer acceptable or responsible to talk about
*when* your organization will change; the
conversation needs to be around *how*
 The point of no return is behind us
 People matter more than we might think, but they
have to be set up to succeed
 Yes, digital publishing is hard, but no one ever said it
was easy!
Jabin White – Wolters Kluwer Health – jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com 23

23. THANK YOU
Jabin White
Director of Strategic Content
Wolters Kluwer Health
Jabin.white@wolterskluwer.com
215.521.8911
Twitter: @jabinwhite
Blog: Technically Speaking at
http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/channel/technically-speaking
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