From: Laval Hunsucker <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:11:15 -0700

Joe Esposito wrote of Elsevier:

> Big organizations become big and stay that way
> because they know what they are doing.
> [. . .]
> When they started out hundreds of years ago, they
> did things that others did not--and prospered.

I'd be careful of emphasizing the factor of a long historical
continuity or traditionally consistent character in this kind of
case.

Elsevier is 132 years old. It swiped its logo and its name from
a bookselling/printing/publishing family which had started out
in the later sixteenth century and gone out of business in the
early eighteenth. That publisher was very unlike the current
Elsevier. The current Elsevier is also very unlike the pre-
Vinken Elsevier (and even unlike the early Vinken Elsevier,
when I worked for the company). During its first sixty years,
until World War II, the present Elsevier operated with a staff of
less than a dozen persons. It was of a modest size -- at any rate
as an STM publisher -- up to around 1970. Up into the 1980s,
it published quite a lot of novels and other fiction, and well into
the 1990s it had a large newspaper division. And that it has
traditionally 'known what it was doing', and been reluctant to
undertake (risky and even unsuccessful) experiments, is, to say
the least, open to serious dispute.

- Laval Hunsucker
  Breukelen, Nederland


----- Original Message -----
> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:32:25 -0700
>
> "Late to the party" is a good metaphor.  Let's examine it in this
> context.
>
> Everyone knows that it is great to buy low and sell high.  But large
> organizations more typically buy high and sell higher. Elsevier has no
> reason to be an experimenter, no reason to play with start-up
> activity.  Being late to the party is a virtue if you are a top
> organization in a particular market, as Elsevier is in journals
> publishing.
>
> Big organizations become big and stay that way because they know what
> they are doing.  This also means that they are not good at handling
> what they never anticipated, but most of the time they have on their
> radar screen all the threats to their business.  This does not mean
> that they never make mistakes.  Supporting RWW was a mistake, for
> example, but it doesn't look like that mistake was more than a social
> gaffe.  Most of the time large organizations can reach out and pull
> into themselves minor threats and irritants.
>
> And when they pull those things in, they assimilate them.  Think of
> the Borg in Star Trek--and if you are not familiar with the Borg, you
> are missing out on one of life's great metaphors.  So it's perfectly
> natural for Elsevier to come late to the party, finally take a glass
> of punch, taste it carefully one sip at a time, and then make their
> independent conclusion.  When they started out hundreds of years ago,
> they did things that others did not--and prospered.  Now they do
> things that others do--do them later, do them better, and do them on
> their own terms.
>
> This is not to defend or attack Elsevier.  The point simply is that
> organizations have inherent properties.  You can attack a start-up for
> not being innovative, but a market leader has different arrows in the
> quiver.  Creative people need not apply.
>
> Joe Esposito