David Nygren, Chief Business Development Officer at Silverchair, moderated a conversation with Penny Ladkin-Brand (CEO of Taylor & Francis), Ha-Hoa Hamano (Principal Product Manager at the U.S. Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office), and Kelli Palmer (Founder & Principal of IDEA Minds), asking what that broader view can offer our community. Together, they explored what scholarly publishing can learn from industries that have already been through disruption, consolidation, and reinvention.
Read the recap below or watch the recording here.
Setting the stage
David opened with a quick poll that confirmed what most of the room already knew: many people in scholarly publishing have spent their careers here. He then asked the panel what moving between industries had taught them. Kelli described it as building a toolbox. “When you change industry environments, I found that the wrench is still handy,” she said. “It just may not be for the thing that you used the wrench for in the last environment.” That kind of cross-industry thinking can occasionally frustrate long-tenured teams, she admitted, but it can also create just enough difference for a breakthrough.Ha-Hoa noted that specialized industries, from space science to public media, often see their processes as uniquely complex, while people who have worked across sectors tend to recognize familiar patterns underneath. Penny pointed to what she learned about risk at Future, a consumer media business that was making a profit but not generating positive cash flow when she joined. “When the certain path is extinction, actually, it gives you a very different appetite for risk,” she said, adding that learning to approach problems from first principles and calibrate risk to the level of change required is valuable wherever you work.
Caution as both strength and constraint
David asked Penny whether the industry’s reputation for moving slowly is a weakness to shed or a source of strength. Her answer was both. “I think the caution has served us phenomenally well because it has helped to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record over hundreds of years,” she said. But publishers now operate alongside technology companies moving at a very different pace, and that means running in the same race. “We need to maintain the continuity and the caution where it matters, and we also need to change pace.”Ha-Hoa, whose recent work has focused on modernizing legacy systems in public media and government, described the approach that has worked best for her. Long-tenured staff often know exactly where change should go, so the job is to listen first and then apply what she has seen elsewhere. Her guiding principle was simple: “Meet them where they are, but don’t leave them there.”
Leading through disruption
Kelli shared her experience that disruption quickly reveals who in an organization has a growth mindset, and that waiting to see how others handle something new like AI can be costly. Using the Kübler-Ross change curve as a framework, she described what successful organizations do. Rather than dragging everyone forward at once, they support and elevate the people on the leading edge of change. “Give them time, give them space, give them support,” she said, and let the results spread to others when the work succeeds. Through several mergers, she saw that the organizations that supported failing fast and learning from mistakes came out ahead.That tolerance for failure came up repeatedly. Kelli noted that technology companies sometimes go as far as giving awards for productive failure. “You can win at failing,” she said, pointing out that in science, an experiment that doesn’t work can be as telling as one that does. Ha-Hoa added that being open about both successes and failures is where she has seen good change happen. Penny saw a clear lesson for publishers, particularly around technology platforms, where the industry’s risk appetite tends to be lowest, and she encouraged more smoke tests to gauge demand before committing to a direction.
Ha-Hoa also shared lessons from her citizen science work at NASA, where she knew she could never out-market the agency’s own engagement machine. Instead, she focused on a niche: amateur radio operators, whose signal disruptions during solar storms provide useful scientific data. By asking who was missing from that community, she connected with women and Black amateur radio operators. “When we go broad and we try and serve everyone, you’re serving no one,” she said. For publishers, she suggested looking for unlikely partners and audiences, and grounding every project in a real need. “Name me a person. I want a real person that said the words that I need this problem solved.”
Lessons from consolidation
David then raised a topic all too familiar to some in the room: consolidation. Kelli, who led people operations through a series of acquisitions, said everyone is best served when all parties are honest about what they want from a transaction. Without that clarity, hidden priorities collide later, and she reminded the room that most mergers and acquisitions fail. “When anybody obfuscates, you get a bad match and everybody loses,” she said. Her advice was to be clear about what you want to preserve and to negotiate around it from the start.Penny encouraged organizations to begin with purpose rather than products. Taylor & Francis has reframed its role from publishing books and journals to amplifying “the voices of the creators of research” and connecting them with the people who use that knowledge. She sees real value in a diverse community of publishers and societies, but scale increasingly matters at the point of discovery, and she pointed to marketplace-style partnerships that offer shared investment and shared scale as an alternative path.
Looking ahead
In the final Q&A, panelists addressed how mission-driven publishers can compete for technical talent that could work anywhere. Kelli encouraged publishers to look again, since layoffs and changing expectations in the technology sector have made many skilled professionals more interested in stability and balance. “Don’t underestimate the power of your value proposition today by looking at it through yesterday’s lenses,” she said. Ha-Hoa added that flexible work and a clear mission still attract people who want meaningful work.Asked what they would change about the industry with a magic wand, Penny pointed to operations. “We digitized historic workflows rather than thinking about what is possible,” she said, and she would like to rethink them to take full advantage of today’s technology. Kelli highlighted the value of unexpected collaborations, while Ha-Hoa reminded the room of what is at stake in supporting accurate, trusted knowledge. “Our democracy depends on it,” she said.
The session made clear that many of the challenges facing scholarly publishing have been navigated successfully in other industries. The organizations best prepared for what’s next will protect what matters, support the people willing to try new things, and stay open to the perspectives that come from outside our own community.
View all Platform Strategies 2026 session recordings here.