Sideways glance: Kings Place and eBay
08 October 2008
A coherent strategy is one that selects not simply what is included, but also, what to exclude. This applies for the box office and the boardroom.
Last week London’s newest arts centre Kings Place opened, and the FT’s Andrew Clark made it to the inaugural five-day festival. Here’s how Clark puts the venue on the map: “[T]he significance of Kings Place lies in the way its design reflects its artistic concept. It’s a case of easy-come, easy-go,” says Clark, “a place where the curious can drop in at lunchtime, teatime, after work or dinner time, just to see what’s going on.” Click here for the full article.
So what is going on? The website (after some digging) told me: “The music programme at Kings Place has been created around the innovative concept of week-long events, curated by a range of different musicians and covering a very wide range of genres.” Plus it’s HQ (or “administrative home”) to two top orchestras and a host of other musical groups who will perform, rehearse and offer workshops. Art galleries and spoken word events enrich the calendar.
Clark’s worry is that Kings Place currently lacks “a defining intelligence who has … a keener sense of how to integrate programmes”. The problem looming is one of coherent focus. Which made me think of eBay, a firm whose strategy seemed very unfocused when it purchased Skype for $2.6bn back in 2005 (see, for example, cnet a year ago).
Richard Waters, writing in the same FT, gives a nice update on my favourite online auction site (here's his piece). The new chief exec John Donahoe is making “efforts to sharpen both operations and strategic focus,” Waters explains. And unlike his predecessor Meg Whitman, Donahoe recognises that Skype is not “central to Ebay’s strategy.”
A defining intelligence (commonly called "strategy") has a starring role in both the box office and the boardroom.