"High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace." Tennessee Williams

"There is an audience for every play; it's just that sometimes it can't wait long enough to find it." Shirley Booth

"No pleasure lasts long unless there is variety in it." Publilius Syrus

Today's image: Test pic #9 by Dave Winer. Very cool shot. Thanks for sharing.

The show must go on

Succession planning is difficult. It's one of the only mission critical tasks that consistently gets a pass until it becomes a high priority, one of obvious and serious urgency. We should get around to that someday becoming What are we going to do now?

The sudden and unexpected loss of the very gifted, hard working and successful Tim Russert serves as a perfect illustration.

As a practical matter, Tim was an incredible talent and a strong leader who held four key posts at NBC News.

Wendy Wilkinson, already on staff, would appear the person most deserving to be named NBC's D.C. bureau chief, one of Tim's responsibilities.

But who is best qualified to serve as the next managing editor and moderator of Meet The Press? Who is the person that can also contribute to the other news division shows as chief political correspondent (and advise parent GE on relevant political matters)? Finally, who is the executive that can serve as effective advocate for political news when dealing with New York.

No doubt, Tim Russert was that most rare of once in a generation broadcasters but the show must go on. Steve Capus and Jeff Zucker have a big, complicated hiring and potential major reorganization on their hands. They'll need to do a job equal to that once done by Michael Gartner in hiring Tim (likely a mission impossible).

Waiting until you need to find someone is never the best strategy. The odds are against you especially when timing is no longer on your side. Succession planning deserves to be a priority on the agenda of every manager before need presents. It's consistently the one must-do that managers just don't do. The unexpected happens and it happens to the best of managers. The failure to develop a solid succession plan twice worked against CBS in recent years. Howard Stern and Dan Rather.

Five suggestions.

1. Champion human resources development. Every person on your team deserves the opportunity to realize their full potential. Develop the people who develop your profits. Exhibit A: Meet The Press EP Betsy Fischer started as an intern on the show seventeen years ago.

2. Make it a requirement. To be eligible for promotion people must have trained and/or identified (and be in contact with) one or more qualified replacements.

3. Formalize succession planning. Make it part of the annual business planning process. Establish timed objectives with delayed incentives for effective implementation (i.e., Identify candidates by dates certain, pay bonuses when actually faced with a need that the plan resolves).

4. Adopt the practice of continuous recruitment. No matter how strong the short list developed continue to network and search for qualified candidates, especially high potential candidates.

5. Keep score. At the end of every week ask yourself "If the airplane went down and [Dave Martin] didn't come back from vacation do we have at least two good candidates ready, willing and legally available to talk with us about [Dave's] job? Whom is [Dave] now training to take his place?" Keep a scorecard listing all your players, grade yourself. How ready are you this week? No, really, this week, right now, how ready are you?

Plan now for the show to go on later. Finding people is made easy when you're looking for them before you need them. Pay no attention to those who would have you (and their bosses) believe "There's no one out there," they're out there and you're paid to find, develop, retain and someday replace them. As the great Paul Drew taught "Planning affords the best ROI."

[Related: Timesmen Bill Carter and Jacques Steinberg write With Tim Russert's Death, NBC Must Replace a Man of Many Roles here and David Carr writes The Media Equation - In Mourning for a Man and his Era, here. WaPo's Eugene Robinson writes The Outsider's Insider here. The story all insiders are talking about - news of Tim's death broke not on NBC but on Wikipedia - BW's Jon Fine w/more here.]

Word to the wise: Don't write another liner, produce another promo or create another ad until you read this PDF. Thank me later.

The responsive chord: Tony Schwartz passes. [Obit, NYT]

Local, local, local: outside.in bows Radar (in preview here)

Grapes: Favorable exchange rates (1 USD = 3.04 ARS) continue to make the wines of Argentina exceptionally good values. Budini, Malbec 2006 (Mendoza). A good red under $10, drinks like a $25 wine.

"Would you persuade, speak of interest not of reason." Benjamin Franklin

"There is nothing like success to blind one of the possibility of failure." Roger Lowenstein

"A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that his is wiser today than he was yesterday." Jonathan Swift

Today's image: The avenue in mist and sun by algo. Wonderful! Thanks for sharing.

"Find out what happened"

Facing the R&R TRS crowd: CBS TV news ace Bob Schieffer did a simply outstanding job speaking before folks attending the Talk Radio Seminar. His observations, storytelling style every bit as crisp and classic as the Burberry shirt he wore. Bob said every newsroom should post a sign over the door reminding news people of their primary mission..."Find out what happened." Bravos to Bob for plainly making the case for the much needed protections of a federal shield law. Talk radio star Jim Bohannon kicked off the Q&A asking about Bob's plans after Jan 09. The broadcast news icon indicated his thought was to do less but still stay on with CBS. Kudos to Erica Farber & company for inviting Bob.

Tim Russert hosted a good show with Pulitzer winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the subject of most important leadership attributes. The complete list later. Here are four...

Withstand adversity

Diverse perspectives

Loyalty

Admit mistakes

Doris' list should be one of the scorecards used to evaluate all leadership (especially today's broadcast leadership).



Reading the new Richard Sennett book, The Craftsman. Highly recommended (Amazon info). Sennett writes about "The Workshop" and my thought is this is an excellent metaphor for today's broadcast shop.

"His Secrets Died with Him"
In Stradivari's Workshop

"In modern parlance, knowledge transfer became difficult; the master's originality inhibited the transfer. This difficulty remains, in scientific laboratories as much as in artist's studios. Although in a lab the neophyte can be inducted in procedures, it's harder for a scientist to pass on the capacity to look suspiciously for new problems in the course of solving old ones or to explain the intuition formed from experience that a problem is likely to wind up a dead-end."

"The difficulty of knowledge transfer poses a question about why it should be so difficult, why it becomes a personal secret...Yet in the fabrication of musical instruments, the secrets of masters like Antonio Stradivari or Guarneri del Gesu have indeed died with them. Mountains of cash and endless experiments have failed to prize out the secrets of these masters. Something in the character of these workshops must have inhibited knowledge transfer."

"When Antonio Stradivari died, he passed on the business to his two sons, Omobono and Francesco, who never married and who spent their adult lives in their father's house as his servant-heirs. They were able to trade on his name for several years, but the business eventually foundered. He had not taught, he could not teach either of them how to be a genius."

"Missing in these analyses (of the master's work) is a reconstruction of the workshops of the master - more precisely, one element that has irretrievably gone missing. This is the absorption into tacit knowledge, unspoken and uncodified in words, that occurred there and became a matter of habit, the thousand little everyday moves that add up in sum to a practice.

The most significant fact we know about Stravidari's workshop was that he was all over it, popping up unexpectedly everywhere, gathering in and processing those thousands of bits of information that could not signify in the same way to assistants who were doing just one part. The same thing has been true in scientific labs run by idiosyncratic geniuses; the master's head becomes stuffed with information only he or she can see the point of. This is why the secrets of the physicist Enrico Fermi as a great experimenter can't be fathomed by poring over the minutiae of his lab procedures.

To put this observation abstractly: in a workshop where the master's individuality and distinctiveness dominates, tacit knowledge is also likely to dominate. Once the master dies, all the clues, moves, and insights he or she has gathered into the totality of the work cannot be reconstructed; there's no way to ask him or her to make the tacit explicit." (emphasis mine)

Chapter Two, The Workshop. The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.

Earlier in the same chapter Sennett writes about originality to wit:

"'Originality' traces its origins back one Greek word, poesis, which Plato and others used to mean 'something where before there was nothing.' Originality is a marker of time; it denotes the sudden appearance of something where before there was nothing, and because something suddenly comes into existence, it arouses in us emotions of wonder and awe. In the Renaissance, the appearance of something sudden was connected to the art - the genius, if you will - of an individual."

Individuals, leaders, let me go so far as to say modern masters the likes of Paley, Primo, Storz, McLendon, Drake, and Donahue (to mention but a few), are the folks who led the sudden appearance of something, they caused events to happen, took control of circumstance while others looked on. What broadcast needs today, in the very least, is exceptional leadership at the station level. Nothing less than great general managers.

Bonus: Academic Blogger Takes Vulture's Spoiler Policy to Task. Kudos to Dan and Lane!

Congrats & cheers: Jamie Dimon (my favorite rock star banker) acquires Bear for a fraction of its book. Les Moonves continues to move CBS into the export business. Smart, very smart.

Cali red: Block No. 45, Petite Sirah 2005. Wonderful, smooth. Amazing value at $10.