What was your challenge?

We wanted to rework the content strategy of our website, CFR.org, so it would play off the news cycle while better leveraging the expert content produced by CFR's research fellows. Among the concrete outcomes we were trying for was to do a better job connecting with several target audiences beyond the traditional foreign policy category, such as business community, educators, and religious leaders.

What were your results?

We launched a redesigned home page and navigation system. One result was an increase in the click-throughs to internal pages built for those specific audiences by 25 percent.

But the program produced many other results, too. For example, it helped us develop a new approach to deciding what innovations to introduce on the website. It's still a work in progress, but increasingly we have been able to move away from a "build it and they will come" approach – by first identifying outcome-based goals and then determining how to measure progress towards meeting them, and then developing the best way to accomplish them. A mantra of the Sulzberger experience is "you can't change what you can't measure." Another mantra is to get everyone thinking with the perspective of a general manager, not just focused on the needs of a single business unit. One device we came up with was for our various department heads to rank over 30 projects that had been proposed for development. This helped make the hard choices more obvious to everyone, and what got scored the highest, of course, were not the projects that met a narrow need, but the ones that were going to make the largest contribution to the enterprise as a whole. The discussion about these results had not really happened before.

Another lesson from the program was to be scrupulous about challenging our assumptions, especially "cherished beliefs." As a simple example of this, when redesigning the website, we had to decide whether to promote our extensive events archive by focusing on video, audio, or transcripts. We started with the assumption that in the age of YouTube, video would be favored, but when we did some testing, we learned that an audience of researchers and students much preferred transcripts, because they are more easily scanned and searched, at least for now.

What do you think makes the Punch Sulzberger Program effective?

Through the other Fellows and their challenges, I had up-close exposure to what some of the most creative minds in the media business are doing that will transform the business in the years ahead. And I got the benefit of their feedback on what we are trying to do, from both the other Fellows and the gifted coaches who lead the program. All sustained over a full year. It's extraordinary.