ABM Conference: How Do You Change Nielsen?

At American Business Media's annual Spring conference at La Quinta, CA, the opening keynote this morning going on right now is by David Calhoun, Chairman/CEO of The Nielsen Company. He is giving a talk about how he sees changing the B2B behemoth. He came in about 15 months ago from GE, and has been instrumental in the change of VNU, after its PE buyout, to the Nielsen brand.

"We chose a set of leadership values. This is what changes people inside the company and possibly an industry. We picked three...these were the ones we wanted palpable change in.-- Integrated: An ad buyer was less interested in any single discreet form of data, but they were trying to put it all together. It was never about saving a buck...it is about integrating all the data in interesting and informative ways.-- Open: When you grow up in a niche world, you have built systems around the notion of proprietary. This was the world we always aspired to, and that's exactly the world we have to break and crush. We are miles from that.-- Simple: Being simple is getting harder every day...but if you're not fighting every day to make it simple, you lose.

On innovation as a value: We are still far off. We still have lots to do internally before we move to innovation."