On the rise

Smart Business Los Angeles, Jan 2009 by Cottrill, Mike

Simplify the details

It would take too much space to fully explain all the services Ascent Media has, but one point of note is that its digital distribution, which handles, among other things, everything done by Sony Pictures, distributes about 50 terabytes a week.

That can lead to simple employee questions like, what's a terabyte?

And even those who didn't Google terabyte to learn that it's equal to 1,000 gigabytes might not fully understand what role digital files play in the future of the industry. This problem is not unique to Royo and Ascent Media. Whenever your company is doing something new or making a change, people are often fuzzy on the details of what tomorrow's business tools and ideas mean to them.

"Simplicity helps a lot, so it's about how you articulate a vision that is clear and astute so everybody knows that this is what we aspire to be," he says. "Be clear about what the vision is, collaborate through the definition of that vision, and then be clear on what the execution components are going to be and who's going to be doing what so there is a common sense of purpose."

Royo uses the example of sharing the vision with his financial people.

"The first thing that we try to do is make sure our finance people are subject matter experts, meaning you want finance people who are not just running numbers but who understand the business, so as we engage through these discussions, it's not, 'Well, all of that is Greek to me,'" he says.

How do you make the elaborate easy to understand? Take out the part that makes it elaborate - new technology specifics, high-end financial terms, anything that an outsider wouldn't understand, and make it about how this is pushing the overall business goal.

"It's not about technology, really," Royo says. "It's about business, and how do we have a healthy business going forward. So you try to extract out all the acronyms and the lingo about the technology and say, 'OK, this is the service the customer needs; these are the key components and requirements that come into being able to provide that service.' Strip all the technology sort of noise out of that equation and make sure that the business explanation and the business model that is put around any financial decision is laid down to that simple vision.

So you force people to distill their ideas away from the pure technology and into the service definition and businesses that we're trying to service."

HOW TO REACH: Ascent Media Corp., (310) 434-7000 or www.ascentmedia.com

The Royo file

Born: Spain

Education: AM, MBA and Ph.D. from Harvard University

What was your very first job?

My father worked for IBM in Spain his whole life, and IBM used to have these big exhibits in Madrid, Spain, and they needed somebody to demonstrate the PC. This was the early days of the PC, they needed someone to demonstrate the new capabilities of the first generation, and I've always been a geek at heart, and my father asked me - I was 14 if I wanted to do that for the better part of the summer. I got to make a little bit of money in what I was doing, and it was a good realization that a lot of people are interested in this stuff.