YouSaid · the spoken record

John Fallon

lines on the record: 77
first: 2019-08-02
most recent: 2019-08-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“All right, I just got to know. And the reason for that is because this is the other big thing about this in that year, days when we were publishing all those textbooks, we invested so much time and effort in the greatest academic rigor, we had absolutely no way of knowing what outcomes they helped to achieve. Now for every product we launch, we know”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Address the cost inflation issue in textbook publishing, which only accounts for sort of 1 or 2% of total student spend, you know, cost inflation in higher education in America over the last 30 years has been unbelievable. That issue needs to be addressed. How can we help and what role can we play in making high quality education much more affordable, much more accessible, much more relevant to more people?”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also because I think they would recognize that we have a sort of intellectual feel for the value of the academy, for the importance of teaching that we recognize why faculty are good at what they do and we could work with them, a whole area where we work with professional certification, recognizing that probably even when I took over from Marjorie, we thought primarily in terms of K through 12 and then higher education, maybe a little bit of graduate.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can, if you like, be the disruptor. So the relationship with Arizona State University empowering a whole new range of online universities grew out of the fact because you have the content. Because they had the content and because they knew that they...”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you're still good at. So, you know, the fact that our content is no less highly valued, our assessment capabilities is no less highly valued. It's still been used in much the same way. What's happened is you mentioned sort of CHEG, Amazon moved into the rental market. So essentially what we found is actually our biggest competitor. Was second hand sales of our own intellectual property once you get your head around that and you just accept that actually $300 textbook is dead we have to reinvent and make a future for this company around you know $40 to rent an ebook $80 for a completely integrated package that provides much more personalization adaptive assessment capabilities that support faculty that's still a sustainable business but then it provides a platform by which”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whenever there's a cyclical problem, there's something structural lurking in the shadow. So I think that and then I think recognizing”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grubs on every data point that tells you that the first dip in revenues is cyclical, not structural. And I heard something in the advertising industry talk recently about, oh, this is cyclical, not struggle. And I just wince because”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a famous phrase, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing you've got one. Right, right. And I think we found, which I think many incumbents find is the first stage is getting through denial as quickly as you can. Every fiber of the organization being...”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you follow, I mean, we, yeah, I mean, we sell a good sort of 10 million units of books a year, hundreds of millions of books a year, if you think that that disruption of that has been financially painful. So when I took over from Marjorie in 2013, one in three courses in American universities uses Pearson content. Today, still one in three courses in America use person content, but the revenues have gone from $2 billion to $1.3 billion. It's exactly, so the analog to digital transition in the short term has been painful. But now I think we've got a better, more sustainable business.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are in the fortings edition of Philip Cottler's marketing, the best-selling marketing textbook in the world. There won't be a 15th edition. Think of it more like FIFA 18, FIFA 19, FIFA 20. It'll be Marketing 2020 version 1, version 2, digital first, designed for a mobile world. You update for when there's changes in the field of study, scientific breakthroughs, new case studies, you update for advances in AI as we think of new ways that we can provide more personal adaptive learning. And because you're breaking away from what was a very expensive and time-consuming analog-led model, it's not just much more effective, much more personal, much better outcomes. It's much lower cost. So through in the dollar textbook, you're dead.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so still about just over 20% of our $5 billion in revenues, annual revenues come from our US higher education courseware or call it college publishing business. These are these giant textbooks. Yeah, and exactly.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That enables them to progress. Right now, that's where you're moving to, but I just want to get people a sense of what Pearson had done. When you're thinking of textbooks, this is actual textbooks that you redo every three years. Explain how it's been done.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolute outcomes as good For their online students as their face to face students, the cost for a student who's out of state to Arizona is significantly lower online, much more flexible, much more adaptive. Large numbers of working adults. I mean, one of the biggest challenges I think America has, we have something like 30 million working adults who have paid for some form of university education but have nothing to show for it. So a lot of it is around how do you help people to complete their university education have the credential and the badge that enables them to progress. So we do a lot of that. We work in countries, you know, work in 70 countries around the world, 24,000 people, big digital transformation. So we're investing about a billion dollars a year in the research and development of things that help people to learn more effectively.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're still the leading education related content business in the world. We lead in assessment and certification. But the fastest area of growth really is now in more services type offerings. And actually combining the content and the assessment powered by technology to really provide much more personalized and adaptive learning. So, I mean, we were talking just before I was with Michael Crowe, president of Arizona State University's in London for a few days. He's a major partner. We helped to run Arizona State University Online, which provides a pure online university experience. He's a fascinating. Fantastic. And all the rigor, all the quality.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After spending 10 years running our education businesses around the world outside of that, I took over from Marjorie in 2013.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think with hindsight, clearly we were all very naive. But I think Britain was caught up in the same thing that I was with Brent Hoberman last night, who was the founder of LastMinute.com, which again, you know, so I mean, I think it was a smaller scale, but it was very much the same trends that you saw in the US. You saw here as well.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think I moved to on the back of those two big acquisitions, Pearson was still very much London-centred company. The two big acquisitions were in America. So I actually moved to with my family to live and work out of New York at the end of 2000. And I think, you know, the Pearson share price reached an all-time high of... I returned back to live out the UK four years later and I think we'd been as low as five pounds. And I think, you know, it was on the back of the AOL Time Warner. And this idea that technology was going to take over sort of everything.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge productivity gain for teachers. They could set homework without having to market. Good for students because actually something like math, guess what? The more you do it, the better you get it And having personal feedback to you without your peers knowing is actually more sort of encouraging. And it frees the teacher up to focus more on where they can add. I think that sort of happened. I think then large scale adoption in, for example, the K-12 sector, I think, is still challenging. Just because of the sheer scale of the infrastructure changes that are required, the social roles that teaching that education plays all that.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“technology harder and faster than many of our customers which obviously universities, school superintendents and the like were ready to go and so I think what you have seen though is a Gradual change. Over a period of 15 years, we'll perhaps talk a little about the evolution of the textbook in a little while. But I think the first stage was automating the setting and marking of homework and quantitative disciplines like math, science.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and then what we found at various points was that I guess it's the sort of the Bill Gates phrase, you sort of overestimate the change in three years and underestimate the change in 10. And I think we tried at that time probably to push.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and I think Pearson did, so Pearson made two big acquisitions at that time. We bought the Simon Schuster education businesses and then we bought a company called NCS, which was an early stage online testing and student information company.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“industrial revolution didn't exist at the time but you know this idea about it didn't sink in then I think I recall being with a lot of the big publishers in fact I oddly enough went around to all the big publishers with Larry Page and Susan Wajiski who now runs YouTube who was trying to digitize things and at the time and everybody gave them the long arm essentially including random house including others and I remember them being very frustrated talking I was it was oddly enough there was a blackout and they were in my apartment they were very frustrated with the state of things and talking about the digitization of course they got in trouble for just doing it on their own talk a little bit about that time because I think you know just recently Barnes& Noble was sold there's you know it's changed so drastically talk a little bit about what was going on in that time in publishing well”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, Pearson itself is coming as 175 years old, actually started in construction, built the railroad tunnels under the eastern Hudson Rivers in New York, amongst many, many other things. And Marjorie actually was the first non-member of the Pearson family to be CEO. She was the first woman to be CEO of FTSE 100 company. She hired me. And then at about that time, if you remember this was the first dot-com boom, which you remember very well. And this idea of sort of, you know, that we're going to be more of a knowledge-based economy, the fourth industrial revolution didn't exist at the time. But, you know, this idea about...”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I still happily remember the afternoon I spent on Baywatch Beach with David Hasselhoff and the like. And it was a period when we were just buying memories. So buying and selling a lot of companies. Yeah, it was your time.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big conglomerate. I mean, people forget that actually the first acquisition Marjorie made as CEO of Pearson was of a company called All American.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think you and I are probably of a similar generation when I was in high school in Manchester in the north of England. Three big passions of my life were football or soccer, politics and journalism. The first wasn't a realistic career option. So I found the way of making a career out of the latter two. And actually I spent the first 10 years of my professional life working for the British Labour Party in one form or another. And then in my sort of early 30s, I made the switch over into business and corporate life. As one of Marjorie's first hires when she became the CEO of Pearson in 97, really to run all of corporate affairs. So I ran sort of investor relations, media, employee communications. And I don't know if you remember that time, at the time Pearson was still a...”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at Large of Recode. You may know me as Mark Zuckerberg's private tutor, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Ricode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network today in the red chair is John Fallon, the CEO of Pearson, which is the largest education company in the world and the former owner of Penguin Random House and the Financial Times. Just recently, Pearson announced that it's going to pivot away from print textbooks and into digital textbooks that can be updated over time. I'm doing this podcast from London, England. John, welcome to Reco Decode.”
2019-08-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Pearson CEO John Fallon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT