August 30th, 2011
Not that anyone cares about comic books in the B-school world, but the DC universe reboot has New Coke written all over it. For anyone collecting string on what looks to be one of the biggest mistakes in the history of corporate management, there’s this amazing tidbit tucked inside a New York Times story:
DC, which is owned by Time Warner, has long lagged behind its rival Marvel Comics, the Disney-owned publisher of Spider-Man and Captain America, in market share if not audience enthusiasm. Its latest company-wide overhaul has been almost a year in the making, devised in October at an editorial retreat where staff members were trying to create a love triangle for Superman, who wed Lois Lane in 1996.
Yeah, so the geniuses spent all of 11 months contemplating the pluses and minuses of deconstructing its entire fucking product line. Actually, it must have been much less than that, since the 11 months includes the time taken to plan and launch the new line.
You’d like to think that if, say, the executives at Ford were toying with the idea of killing off every vehicle they manufactured and instead rolling out tractors, motorcycles, and mining equipment, they would spend more than a few months kicking it around and doing some research before they pressed the self-destruct button.
And it’s not like DC is some indie publishing company that can do whatever it wants–they’re own by Time-Warner, a real, honest-to-blog big-boy multinational corporation. Were there no grownups anywhere to say, “Hey, this is an interesting idea and all, but let’s think it over for a while . . .”
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