Going Beyond Ebooks: One Publisher's Journey from a Book to Training, Print to Digital

In 1987 authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner published The Leadership Challenge with San Francisco-based publisher Jossey-Bass. Later that year, their training assessment Leadership Practices Inventory was published by San Diego-based training publisher Pfeiffer. A series of acquisitions eventually brought all of the authors’ content and related rights together and under the purview of Wiley. Over the last decade, this product line has experienced strong, steady growth as well as transformational change as the authors and global publishing team moved from an exclusively print-based business to a diversified portfolio of both product and service offerings that span multiple markets around the globe. Over 40% of the franchise revenue is currently generated from the web-based assessment applications and that number is expected to keep growing as the publishing team explores new ways to present this premier leadership development model via elearning applications and web-based simulation. At the heart of this story is a traditional publisher’s struggles (from editorial to production to marketing to sales) to reinvent themselves and re-imagine what publishing really means.