New Media Leadership to Come from Engineering and Technology Disciplines?

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There has been a lot of great conversation recently about Mad Men becoming Math Men ( thanks, Terry), and it got me thinking about parallels with other industries. While we in the ad industry like to think we are trendsetters for the world, there are other good examples in recent business history where industries were transformed by the march of technology.

Twenty-five years ago, the biggest music companies were Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI, MCA and PolyGram. As consolidation ensued, by the turn of the century, there were only four major players left (Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner), old dogs, chugging along by the power of name value and market control. CDs and cassette tapes were the “protected” vehicles controlled by these companies to push out their products. We all know what came next with the Internet, MP3s, file-sharing — and of course, instead of changing course to deliver content to consumers in the format they desired, these music companies funneled money into the RIAA and started suing their consumers instead. Brilliant. In that same time-span technology companies picked up on this shift and built distribution channels that broke the old brick-and-mortar models. Here we are now in 2010, and the most influential music company is not Sony or Universal, but Apple, a technology company. Tangentially, Tom Barrack, the founding CEO of Colonial Capital, the world’s largest real-estate manager, this week predicted that Apple CEO and Pixar creator Steve Jobs is destined to become the next Samuel Goldwyn: “You can’t name who is the new movie mogul. But it will be Steve Jobs and Apple TV four years from now,” he told CNBC.

This power shift of engineers taking over old-school industry executives isn’t just exclusive to the media world, however — the same thing happened in Silicon Valley…

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