A 'Maker of the Future'
Brooks cites one of his biggest and ongoing challenges as: "How do you create opportunities for folks who have spent their entire careers in print? How do you move them into digital? We've been doing that. We've been wrestling with that from the beginning."
He says that the key to that challenge is to reconceive the way employees view themselves. "The base skills of a good production manager in print are the same base skills that are needed in digital," Brooks notes. "The challenge that I've seen is that many [production] folks view themselves and get a lot of their self-worth from, 'I make beautiful books.' If you can … make that individual transition from 'I make beautiful books' to 'I help people learn' or 'I provide tools that help people learn,' it's a lot easier."