TRANSFORMING AN AMERICAN INSTITUTION
Increasing velocity at The Weather Channel
How do you transform something that people love exactly the way it is?
This is essence of the innovator’s dilemma: The world is changing, and adaptation is vital to survival. Yet, the people closest to you every day — our fans and fellow employees — love the product and business exactly the way it is.
At The Weather Channel, our operation has certainly experienced immense change over the past four years. We launched both a new proprietary weather data and audience analytics platform capable of processing 26 billion data requests per day, as well as an expanded cross-platform production infrastructure focused on creating compelling video to stoke interest in weather beyond the local forecast.
We became the #3 most-used mobile property globally — larger than Snapchat, Pinterest, and Netflix — and the #2 broadcast news provider of video on Facebook.
We launched a full network rebranding that featured new programming, on-screen design presentation, and marketing campaigns, leading to deeper consumption of The Weather Channel on TV — Last year, the network had its best quarter of ratings since 2012 and best month of ratings since 2011. During this year’s Winter Storm Jonas, we drew more viewers than any other network on cable.
But, when I started at The Weather Channel four years ago, the amount of progress reflected by these accomplishments was not a foregone conclusion. As I weighed my offer to join the company, a former colleague referred to The Weather Channel as “an American institution.” The phrase simultaneously captured both our opportunity and challenge. The Weather Channel became a world-renowned and ubiquitous brand — one that grew into the “institution” to which it was compared — because of the unmatched, world-class weather science that has always powered our leading storm coverage. But, institutions, especially those of The Weather Channel’s size and history, are by their very definition not known for being nimble. They tend to evoke the stereotype of a lumbering cruise liner, while start-ups, salivating at the opportunity to take advantage of changes in technology and consumer preferences, circle them like speed boats with new business models and disruptive thinking.
The Weather Channel of 2012, recently emerging from family ownership, found itself facing such a threat. TV and digital consumption habits were being reshaped. Information aggregators like Facebook and Google were becoming more powerful. The development of new technology continued to raise expectations for the speed and quality of weather forecasting and services.
Fortunately, our executive team collectively recognized this risk. We believed the best way to honor The Weather Channel’s place in the lives of our fans would be to ensure our company would serve their needs for the next thirty years the way we had in our first thirty. Doing so, though, didn’t necessarily mean being the same Weather Channel. Rather, it meant being a Weather Channel that evolved as quickly as did the ways in which information was consumed.
Responding to a rapidly changing media landscape would only be possible if we first established a company-wide culture of velocity.
This specific term — velocity — was intentional: Velocity is not just speed, but speed with direction. Moving fast was only impactful, and frankly possible, if everyone was pulling in the same direction.
Conversely, sharing a vision for the future was only an academic exercise if not acted upon quickly enough to still be relevant by the time the team reached the finish line.
Our commitment to velocity was built on three principles:
1. Articulate a rallying cry
A corporate mission serves more than one purpose. While most simply, a clearly articulated vision communicates to the entire company its forward-looking strategic direction, more importantly, when done right, it gives a company a cause to rally around, one that excites and motivates the entire organization on a daily basis.
At any given point over the past four years, our company has had a ranging set of activities, spanning meteorology, data science, television programming, digital product, business services and more. As we considered these diverse initiatives, we arrived at a mission that was straightforward, yet powerful: To become the world’s best weather. World-class weather is the catalyst for everything we do, whether it be the lifesaving information and storytelling we share with consumers, the services we provide to businesses, or the world-class science that powers our data and insights. Weather, sitting at the center, unified these diverse pieces of our company behind a singular cause.
2. Find “Zero Seconds” leaders
My colleague David Clark, the President of The Weather Channel, often describes his favorite leadership training activity. Two chairs are placed on opposite sides of the room, with a team told they have to transport a tennis ball from one chair to the other, as quickly as possible, using only their index fingers. Typically, the team lines up side-by-side and, after a few attempts passing the ball down the row, starts to congratulate themselves on completing the task in only a few seconds. At this point, the moderator announces that, actually, the world record for the task is not a few seconds, but zero seconds. The team, stunned, thinks for a moment, and eventually realizes they can take the chair from one side of the room and place it face down on the second chair so that the tennis ball is touching both at once — Voilà! Zero seconds.
The exercise is meant to show how our expectations shape the solutions we find in our work. Many times, we take constraints for granted. But, if we start with our goal, we can often back into creative ways to reach the right outcome. This notion is especially important during times of immense change, when, facing exhausting headwinds and unexpected obstacles, it can be more difficult to resist such constraints.
As a company, we sought out leaders who adopted a “zero seconds” mentality. In a competitive industry with internal access to limited internal resources, we knew that we would inevitably face trying moments. We needed a team — pairing those with rich institutional experience alongside outsiders with a unique perspective — who together would approach these obstacles with an unwavering dedication to finding creative solutions to reach our goals.
3. Promote operating transparency
With clear direction and an exceptional team, consistent day-to-day progress then came from shared accountability to each of our responsibilities. No tool became more important in promoting this accountability than transparency. As the saying goes, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
This transparency spanned a number of dimensions. We were first transparent about our expectations. At the start of the year, and again every quarter, each group at the company published not only a roadmap of the projects they expected to complete over the next twelve months, but also the targets they would use to measure success. Then, as appropriate on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, we published for the entire company how each team tracked against their self-assigned metrics. Finally, we were transparent about our results. When we were successful, we celebrated as a company, honoring our wins and thanking those who put in such long hours to make it possible. When we missed our goals, we conducted an honest assessment of what went wrong and quickly corrected course.
Four years into my time at The Weather Channel, this culture of velocity has become ingrained as part of our operating system, embedded into the thousands of decisions made across the company on a daily basis. It’s been this internal transformation that not only has allowed us to accomplish everything we have in the past four years, but also what will steady the company to be resilient in the face of a rapidly changing media landscape for the future.
