"True success is the only thing that you cannot have unless and until you have offered it to others." Sri Chinmoy

"For truth and duty it is ever the fitting time; who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking, will never accomplish anything." Martin Luther

"Success is the child of audacity." Benjamin Disraeli

Today's image: Lost by IrenaS. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Video: Charlie Rose interviews Marc Andreessen. Highly recommended. An important reminder...always play offense.

"What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance. What the consumer thinks he is buying, what he considers 'value' is decisive." Peter Drucker

"Limiting one's pursuits to one lone avenue without benefit of change or diversion can result in a form of vapidity which sometimes deadens imagination." Edwin Uhl

"The virtue of imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things." John Ruskin

Today's image: Ordinary magic by IrenaS. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Good reads: Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin [Amazon info]. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell [Amazon info]. Fiction, worth reading, again: The Road by Cormac McCarthy [Amazon info]

Live ammo: You have a talent working for you. A well known talent with a history of thirty years in the market. The talent has consistently delivered top ratings for decades under diary measurement. Since the introduction of PPM the talent has failed to show the same winning numbers. The most recent monthly numbers show the talent is ranked 20th in demo a year after being moved from afternoons on one station into a morning drive shift on another station. You have two and one-half years remaining on the talent's agreement, an obligation of approx three million dollars. You play or pay the talent? In the case of CBS they made the decision last week to pay the talent, Steve Dahl, rather than continue to play him. Your thoughts? Back to blog about this Monday.

"Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement." Alfred Adler

"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer

"That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false." Paul Valery

Today's image: Follow your bliss by IrenaS. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.
















Tom Asacker has a new book coming next month.

I know Tom but have not been provided an advance copy.

Not able to comment on how good or how valuable the book will be.

However...

A Little Less Conversation: Connecting with Consumers in a Noisy World

Sure sounds like a good bet, get your pre-order in today. Amazon pre-order info. [Tom's related post] Congrats, Tom. Looking forward to another good read.

Learning to lead: This ain't your dad's broadcast business. Rock radio maven Fred Jacobs blogs about leadership and tech this morning...

"If we're going to compete, we need to go to school. Everything we've learned about content creation, communication, and entertainment has value. But how it is distributed and enjoyed by end-users is radically changing, and understanding those dynamics is crucial for transitioning radio from the cozy business in the '70s, '80s, and '90s to the one that must compete with Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Sergey Brin."

Read Fred's entire post here.

My sense is what's needed is more than a good measure of continuing professional education, however, that would be a good start. How it's possible for someone to be leading the charge at a media firm in 2008 and not be fluent in VRM, Clay Shirky or Denise Shiffman (or in the least able to grok each) should be cause for concern. If the CEO is not able to appreciate the transformative power of RSS, the simplicity of WebKit or the potential of Google's new V8, they damn better have someone on staff that does. That someone, CTO/CIO, should have a place at the table along with their head of HR.

Show me a media company without a bright CTO/CIO in the inner circle and I'll show you a company living and operating in the past. [Hint: Assigning this job as an additional duty to one of your bright, young computer geek field-based CEs is not a serious approach and will not get the job done. Those tech on the cheap days are over, Sparky]

Show me a CEO who still believes HR is a "girl job" and not a critically important senior executive post and I'll show you a company functioning past its best used by date. We are involved in a war for talent and in most cases just not prepared to fight. The next cohort entering the workplace expects their employer to appreciate their sensibilities or at minimum to understand what's important to them. Never before has there been a group of better educated or more qualified young people entering the work force and too few in broadcast have a clue as to how to recruit, develop or retain this most precious of all resourses.

What these leaders have in common is a shared denial, they fail to understand the reality of strategy decay. They are the perpetual followers, all paying attention to the same things and not paying attention to the same things. They are caught up in trying to get better when the most effective solution is being obsessed, driven with getting different. It's not about tweaking the numerator, it's about changing the denominator. The fish stinks at the head first.

Bonus: From our friends at BBC comes Radio Pop.