"Applause is the only appreciated interruption." Arnold Glascow

"To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting." E.E. Cummings

"Fortune pays sometimes for the intensity of her favors by the shortness of their duration." Baltasar Gracian

Today's image: Morning light in the woods. By Fred Winston. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Disruptive strategy:

zag when others zig

The Great American Dream Machine was a weekly magazine show on public television (1971-72). A mix of short features, sketches and song, it was both satire and documentary. It's acknowledged as seminal work, a precursor to Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show.

The show runners planned to launch the show with rotating weekly hosts but the brilliant Sheila Nevins, at the time, a producer on the show, had a better, original idea. Go without a host, use images and animation as bridges to connect the segments. Nevins' unconventional, fresh concept proved to be a masterstroke.

Let's remember the wise counsel of Gordon McLendon - "The Old Scotsman" 

Carefully study what every station in the market
 is doing, then do the opposite.

What's important is creating perceptible contrast. Nothing subtle whatsoever. Strive to be obvious, palpable, visceral. The marketing genius Dale Pon called this approach "high definition communication" (way back in the early 1980s). 

Do your homework. Know that, in most situations, there is more than one right answer. Follow the lead of Nevins, McLendon and Pon. Have the courage to zag when others zig.

ICYMI: Good reads

What does the Facebook experiment teach us? By danah boyd, here

This American Gamble. Ira Glass's 'This American Life' Leaves PRI. By Cara Buckley, here 

11 Top Quotes on Complexity Plus a Startup Twist. By Margaret Molloy, here

Sharing and celebrating your favorite authors. By Seth Godin, here

Recommended: Shakespeare's Montaigne. Greenblatt and Platt. Classic. NYRB detail, here

Have fun. Make something happen! 

Thanks for stopping by. See you on the Twitter. 

"We hate to decide. We avoid deciding. We hide from it...Once someone decides, they almost always succeed (unless they want to win an Olympic medal or some other ridiculous prize awarded to just a few). The decision is the hard part, but we spend precious little time on it." Seth Godin

"In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." Theodore Roosevelt

"Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision." Peter Drucker

Today's image: Mount Hood by rasone. Amazing. Thank you very much for sharing.

Be Decisive

One of the most important and difficult responsibilities of effective leadership is being decisive. Gathering relevant information, ensuring data used is credible, timely (fresh), crafting and seriously considering a variety of practical solutions sets, while essential, are the easy parts of the decision making process. The most challenging part involves intellectual rigor devoid of pedantry.

"Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."
George Bernard Shaw

Thinking is the underlying magic, the hard work in the decision making process, the wellspring of good decisions. Critical thinking, at its best, is an intellectually honest labor, the product of cognitive diversity, it's serious thought imbued with imagination.

"Most people in an industry are blind in the same way - they're all paying attention to the same things, and not paying attention to the same things."
Gary Hamel

My sense is too many firms have defined and adopted so much best practice that they have become, more or less, identical. This operating mindset comes from prizing only the knowable, respecting nothing but the proven, it's a process driven by the singular mission of minimizing the unpredictable. Unfortunately, this approach inevitably leads to institutionalized risk-aversion and incrementalism. Innovation gives way to inertia. Original thinking is not required. Moreover, the "untested" is discouraged, frowned upon. The danger is this becomes an irrational quest for the holy grail of predictability, a search for something elegant (perhaps something akin to the next Black-Scholes formula). Caution, one might be wise to mind the counsel of Albert Einstein: "Elegance is for tailors." In other words, be skeptical of elegant math.

It is my suggestion that there has never been a time more favorable, more ripe for being a contrarian. Dare to embrace the naive assumption. Foster the chaos that is unvarnished candor, search for what's missing, carefully study what your competitors are doing and seriously consider doing the exact opposite. Differentiate in all you do. Create contrast. Each day, ask yourself the most important questions of all...WHY? and WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?

"Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen
and thinking what nobody has thought."
Albert von Szent-Györgyi

Once you've done your homework, done the hard work of thinking and reached your decision let me suggest that you add one more important step before taking action. It comes from Harvey Mackay, the famous Minnesota envelope maker turned business writer, and it's a gem. Gather your team one more time and ask...

"What are the five things that could go wrong,
and what would we do about each."

Today's quote by Seth Godin courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. It comes from an interview with Seth on Hugh's blog, Gapingvoid (linchpin: ten questions for seth godin). Earlier this month Hugh started "Hugh's Daily Cartoon" - it's free via email and I highly recommend it, sign-up here.

Get more info on Seth's new book Linchpin, (it's a good read) via Amazon, here.

My thanks to Seth and Hugh.

"Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student." Stewart Brand

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." Eric Hoffer

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but illusion of knowledge." Stephen Hawking

Today's image: ...the day is done by valonnna. Great shot. Thanks for sharing.

Spending the last days of this year writing my 2010 brief. The working (draft) title is The Handset Horizon: Leading digital innovation. The executive summary will be a forty-five minute presentation taken from the full ninety-minute brief. To learn more about the brief and availability, please contact me directly via email (my contact info may be found in the left column of this page). Thank you.

Here's one key lesson for media managers from my 2009 brief:

Your assets must be...

Digital
Discoverable
Ready to Share

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2010 by Ravit Lichtenberg via ReadWriteWeb...

"Whether you are an individual, a startup, small business or a large corporation, an online presence and an ongoing conversation with your constituents is a baseline requirement -- and will take time and expertise. Companies are diverting resources and rethinking their traditional outreach strategies. 'Whether you're recruiting, looking for investment, trying to get buzz -- you need to be visible,' says John Nogrady, director, emerging business at Microsoft bizpark, and serial entrepreneur. Brian Zisk, founder of SFMusicTech, which is taking place in San Francisco this week, says 'If you're out there as a genuine contributor in the community you can reach out to many people. Take the FooFighters' free Facebook concert, or Zoe Keating -- a local artist with over 1.2 million fans online. Their ability to connect with their fans was made possible because of the Internet.'" Read the entire post, here.

Bonus: Get your week off to a great start. Take some time to review What Matters Now. Download your own copy, share, post. Think! Make something happen. My thanks to Seth Godin for sharing.

What Matters Now

“The business world is full of two kinds of people—builders and traders. Over the past 20-30 years, traders have increasingly ruled. They receive the highest compensation. We need to tame the traders.” Roger Martin

"Status comes from running large, high-revenue business units whose operations have been reduced to reasonably reliable algorithms that product results on time and on budget. Those are the highest goals, that is, the ones that command the highest compensation. That is why most executives prefer the known to the unknown." Roger Martin

"Most companies try to be innovative, but the enemy of innovation is the mandate to 'prove it.' You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning." Roger Martin

Today's image: Jul 9, 2009 - Full moon over 96th St. by Ed Yourdon. Wonderful shot. Thanks for sharing.

Let's play catch up. A bunch of good stuff to share.

Let me again suggest that you read The Design of Business by Roger Martin [Amzn info]. Put simply, Martin has written one of the most important business books of the year. Priced at under $20 on Amazon, it's a gem that deserves your attention (and that of your team).

Speaking of books, while we await his latest [Drive - Amzn info], Daniel Pink shares his favorite books of 2009, here.

"The problem is no longer budget. The problem is no longer access to tools.

The problem is the will to get good at it." Seth Godin

Seth Godin offers a must-read post. He asks "Is it too late to catch up? What if your organization or your client has done nothing? What if they've just watched the last fourteen years go by? No real website, no social media, no permission assets. What if now they're ready and they ask your advice? And, by the way, they have no real cash to spend..." Seth offers an excellent top ten list of things to consider doing, here.

Tom Webster continues to post interesting things. Raising The Game In Social Media is Tom's latest thoughtful post, here via his brandsavant (which I encourage you to put in your reader). But wait, there's more. Tom has rebooted his mad cool link blog DataSnob, don't spend another online minute without it, here.

Sharon Waxman dials us into the Comcast NBCU arithmetic, to wit: "...NBC was valued at zero for the purposes of the financial analysis." Read Comcast: It's a Brave New World, and Cable Runs It via her WaxWord stand at thewrap.com, here.

Jennifer B. Kahnweiler offers a good read - Why Introverts Can Make The Best Leaders (They draw on important strengths that extroverts may not have) via Forbes.com, here.

Closed circuit to broadcast managers: Should your team not yet be in touch with MediaNet my suggestion is you need to get to know them. My sense is you can create competitive advantage for your station using the tools and tech resources offered by MediaNet. Here's some insight, take a moment and read the Matt Rosoff piece, MediaNet could power the online music revolution via CNET News, here.

Best of the best: A work in progress. THE essential 2009 End-of-Year Lists by the uber-cool Rex Sorgatz [@fimoculous], here. Except no substitute.

Which one doesn't belong: You remember the game from grade school. Apple, Banana, Orange, Hammer. Try this one. Elvis, Jordan, Pryor, Stern. That's the group comparison made in the latest TV ad for Mel's pay radio venture - it's plainly delusional. Creative fails to make the sale. Moreover, it's a pure waste of money the venture doesn't have. This poor creative and related wrong-headed investments were bound to happen. Mel is nothing more than a novice when it comes to spending money on marketing.

Let's connect: Should you be on LinkedIn, an invitation to join your network is welcome, here. If you're on the Twitter, please do follow me and engage so that I may follow you back, here. Thanks.

Thanks for stopping by.

"Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true." John Keats

"A man must learn to endure that patiently which he cannot avoid conveniently." Michel de Montaigne

"In talking about a genius, you would not say that he lies, he sees realities with different eyes from ours." Constantin Stanislavski

Today's image: 1jpg by Gavin Goodman. Wonderful shot. Thanks for sharing.

When they don't know what they don't know: Seth Godin makes a good point, Probably not stupid...

"When the board of directors embraces a fading old media model instead of embracing a strategy that leads to rapid growth, it's probably because each of them started with a worldview about the way things worked and were going to work. Add to that little direct experience, and it's no wonder they decided what they did. You would too if you were given the same resources to begin with.

Changing worldviews is very difficult and requires quite a bit of will. Changing the data at hand is a lot easier, and that's where marketing can really help. If you, as a marketer, can package data in a way that people with a certain worldview can accept, you move the conversation forward far more quickly than if you merely dismiss the non-customers or the doubters as stupid."

Read Seth's entire post, here.

Chicago Tribune streets new redesign Monday. Blog and video tour here. Thanks to Twitter pal Col Tribune for the tip.

Bonus: Clay Shirky - It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. Highly recommended. Web 2.0 video here. David Foster Wallace syllabus for Lit Interp class, here. My thanks to Sophia.

Congrats & cheers: Matt Thompson bows Newsless.org Alex Ross awarded MacArthur genius grant, well deserved. His always interesting blog, The Rest is Noise, should be in your reader.

"The mind's direction is more important than its progress." Joseph Joubert

"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." Oscar Wilde

"Everybody calls 'clear' those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own." Marcel Proust

Today's image: Stop! by tj scott. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

Seth blogs The secret of the web (hint: it's a virtue)...

"I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about thirty years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win."

Bravos, Seth. Well said. Read the entire post here.

Thanks for stopping by. See you next week in a brand new show.

"It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications." Alfred North Whitehead

"Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law." Immanuel Kant

"This time, like all times, is a good one if we just know what to do with it." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today's image: Ratingen - Breitscheid by Ventura Carmona. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

The holiday approaches. This might well prove to be my last post of the week. Then again...

The Summer Tune of 2008: Like everything else it's a pro-am folks. In this corner the pro, Sean Ross and in the other corner, Dan & Lane those uber-cool Vulture folks from NY Magazine. Each assisted by comments. You decide. Comments welcome. FYI - Brian Kelly, the radio programming ace that I continue to have child-like faith in tells me it's still "too early to tell."

Unfiltered: Client CEO to me "The only competitive advantage is people. Our people are better than the competition, as a result, we win. We spend more on training than our competitors do on advertising. They don't get it." (FD: on the day job we provide training to the CEO's managers)

Mea culpa: Some years ago I called out Seth Godin for his exclusive use of the PDF format in the Change This initiative. I said he was wrong. Turns out Seth was right. PDF has now become an ISO standard. My apologies to Seth.

Bonus: Flickchart (beta) and the blog. You decide the best movies of all time. The workout for your brain - MindHabits (thanks to Steve Rubel for the tip)

Buzz: Google closing their Dallas and Denver offices, the election is relo or severance. Best of luck to all involved. HBO presents The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale, more here [official site]

Given up Twitter for the summer. Hanging my hat at FriendFeed. It's on. All the big kids are playing there.

Congrats & cheers: Abhay Parekh bows Flowgram. Amazing!

Found along the way while looking for something else...Mike Tyson quote "Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth."

Have a wonderful and safe holiday weekend.

"A man's accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail." John Foster Dulles

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question." Camus

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you." Aldous Huxley

Today's image: the sine by PETERFOTO. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Each day seems to bring another wave of email that includes links to negative rants about broadcast. The DTV transition is a train wreck, HD Radio is a failure, the Radio 2020 campaign is a non-starter, broadcast journalism has become a joke, the NAB is worthless, TvB and RAB are increasingly irrelevant. Broadcast conventions are no longer worth attending. Sales are off and things are not going to get better anytime soon. Arbitron's PPM is junk science. Nielsen's C3 rankings are worthless. The thirty second TV spot is no longer effective. There's nobody out there, the talent pool has become the talent puddle. Gen Y not only doesn't listen to radio or watch TV, they have no interest in a career in broadcast. There's no leadership in broadcasting, we have become an industry without heroes. The thrill is gone, working in broadcast is no longer fun. The bean counters and suits have destroyed our once great business. Pure and simple the broadcast trade we knew and loved is dead.

It would be one thing to start one of these arguments and present some possible solutions, get a serious and honest discussion going, after all these are important topics. The trend seems to be against any such discussion. Most of what's out there are rants by the anonymous and in the few cases of those with the courage to put their name on their opinions too many are being just plain rude. Too many fronting an all or nothing attitude "if you're not with me then you're against me, you're wrong, you're stupid and don't get it." Discourse devoid of civility. Which brings to mind the words of Eric Hoffer "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."

Readers of this blog are familiar with my pov. There has never been a time of greater opportunity than today. We are living in an age where the quality, quantity and diversity of audio and video is reaching new, unprecedented levels. There's a lot of really good stuff happening out there, folks playing at the top of their game producing truly remarkable work. Yes, we live in disruptive times. Yes, the rule sets are changing. No, the business as usual of today is not producing the results of yesterday. We can complain, scream at the rising tide, get involved in rants bashing how things are without suggesting alternatives or we can get involved. We can stay engaged in the futile efforts of getting better at playing defense or we can get different, get proactive and serious about game-changing innovation. Gordon R. Sullivan wrote "If you are not attacking, you are defending; while there can sometimes be good reasons to defend, in the end you will win only by seizing the initiative and attacking." The former Army Chief of Staff was right when he taught "Hope is not a method." Let me add one more thought. This from George S. Patton, Jr. who said "One does not plan and then try to make circumstances fit those plans. One tries to make plans fit the circumstances." Get involved. Make something happen. Focus on results. Remember and learn from what used to be, dream about and work on creating what could be. Forget getting better, get on with getting different.

Congrats & cheers: Charlie Rose on his simply wonderful conversation with retailing genius Mickey Drexler (posting the video here when available). Brian Lamb and team C-SPAN on bringing us the brilliant Professor Stephen Hawking on "Why we should go into space."

Bonus: Kevin Kelly writes about the making money in the long tail...

"A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living."

The entire post here, follow-on post here. Kudos, Kevin. Interesting thesis, fine presentation. My sense is (and he'll no doubt correct me should I be in error) Seth Godin has already done this, already created the proof for Kevin's thesis. Seth not only has more than 1,000 true fans but has done an exemplary job of leading that fan base. If any person could make a living with 1,000 true fans my bet would be Seth could. Sorry Seth, my choice of words is not what it should be here, meaning no disrespect to you nor your fans in using the verb "leading." Leading your fans would be a good thing, no?

"Though constantly looking at people, one rarely forms new impressions of them, impressions implying the registration of novelty rather than the confirmation of prejudice. At only a few stages do we actively sketch a picture of someone - on first meeting, after a long absence, in the course of a furious row, after an illness, something to break the laziness of photographic habit." Alain de Botton

"One can look at seeing...one can't hear hearing." Marcel Duchamp

"We build up whole culture patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact." Robert Pirsig

Today's image: 2 of Spades by jaylara. Excellent. Thank you for sharing.

Leadership makes a difference.

Marin Alsop the gifted music director of the Baltimore Symphony told Charlie Rose last night she wants her legacy to be "...a culture of joy about making music."

She also suggested the same orchestra, playing the same maps, in the same hall led by five different conductors would produce five perceptibly different performances.

She's right.

In my experience the same performers, working in (basically) the same format, at the same station led by different show runners, EPs or program directors produce perceptibly different performances. Moreover, I have witnessed or been involved many times when stations with the same staff, same format go from worst to first in the ratings by changing leadership.

The six word job description of a leader is get the best out of others.

Marin says that one needs to "enable them" and that means one must be sincere, authentic, committed. She told Charlie believing in people was key.

She's right. Check out the video.



Nobody likes it but the listeners: The vogue subject matter some are writing, opining about and beating to death is the false notion, the canard, that the youth are no longer listening to radio.

Total nonsense.

Exhibit A: Brian Kelly's 103.7 KISS FM.

Here is the station's five book cume rating trend, 12-17 persons...

49.1, 49.7, 50.4, 50.0, 55.4

55 out of every 100 teens in Milwaukee tuned in to one station, Brian's radio station, at least once a week this past fall.

That's up from 49 in the fall of 06.

Up.

But wait, there's more. 103.7 KISS FM posted a 35.5 cume rating with 18-34 persons. A full third of all Milwaukee 18-34s said they listened to one station, KISS, during the week. Congrats and cheers to Brian Kelly and his amazing staff on another killer book.

Closed circuit to Radio CEOs - Part one (of I don't know how many in a series)...

Applause

That's one of the things missing in most outfits today.

Catch your station people doing something right.

No matter how bad things are and, I know, things are not good this January, someone at some station in your group is hitting the cover off the ball. Are David Field and Weezie Kramer showing Brian Kelly the love? I'll bet you that's one of the biggest reasons why he is still getting his mail in Milwaukee and not in Chicago, LA or New York.

It's about leadership. It's about the Radio CEO understanding their legacy to be "a culture of joy about making great radio." Some words are very powerful, thank you very much and I'm proud of you have their own weather systems. Catch people doing something right. Show them that you care. "Action today!" as Churchill famously said.

Game on.



Set the wayback machine for November, 1958, Louisville, Kentucky...

RADIOPULSE

4:00-5:00 PM, Monday - Friday

Station Men - Women - Teen - Children - Total - AQH Rating

WAKY 28 51 49 5 133 9.9
WINN 39 77 13 5 134 4.0
WHAS 35 89 6 7 137 2.4
WKLO 37 78 16 7 138 3.4
WAVE 37 80 8 7 132 2.6
WLOU 37 75 13 6 131 0.8

The guy holding down afternoons on WINN was Johnny Martin, my dad. Not bad for a PD with an airshift.

"We have conducted a thorough search and are able to report to you without reservation that there is no money in the building"

During my talk last week to the sales team at a client TV station, the one line that generated an email from almost all attending. Thank you very much.

Getting and staying focused on top line delivers one of the very best ROIs. When you've got top line working the bottom line takes care of itself. Hint: Ensure your sellers aren't doing their best selling in the building.

"We are in the friction removal business."

A great line on leadership by Tom Peters from his Project05 doc. Outstanding! Thanks TP!

Bonus: Seth has written something you need to read. Only two years left...

"So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That's why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It's never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment -- just one second -- to decide."

Thanks, Seth. Bravos! Wonderful! Read the entire post here.

Bonus 2: Radio programming ace Michael Fischer tips me to another Seth post, Workaholics...

"A workaholic lives on fear. It's fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear."

Read Seth's post here. Thanks, Michael! FUD is deadly; decide to be optimistic and go for greatness! Make something happen. Patton said it, quoting Bismarck (quoting Napoleon) "L'Audace, toujours l'audace" Audacity, always audacity.

Congrats & cheers: Robert Scoble joins Mansueto Digital to launch FastCompany.TV - smart, very smart. Release here.

"Leadership involves remembering past mistakes, an analysis of today's achievements, and a well grounded imagination in visualizing the problems of the future." Stanley C. Allyn

"We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us." Christian Bovee

"One of the greatest victories you can gain over a man is to beat him at politeness." Josh Billings

Contrast!

It's what separates the winner from every other player.

It's the dramatic difference! that Tom Peters rants about (thank you very much TP!).

It's the essence of the Rosser Reeves USP, the heart of the Trout & Ries positioning premise and the real secret of the Seth Godin purple cow.

Job one: Create Contrast

Creating contrast is, in fact, the single most critical factor in every winning political campaign. It's what Ailes gets, what Klein is doing his best to make happen and, clearly, what Abrams fails to grasp. In the last century we called it "integrity in the short listen" or "impact in the short viewing" or "perceptions on the first visit." They all hold true today. How exactly is your "brand" experience dramatically different (and memorable)?

In my experience (day jobs), creating contrast has been the key to producing winning results, truly remarkable achievements and progress, in every single broadcast, cable, online, political and retail endeavor where we have been fortunate to be involved.

Contrast.

Don't even consider winning your market without first thinking about, imagining, adopting and committing to a very serious contrast strategy.

20th century challenge: get better
21st century challenge: get different

Contrast! Remember the words of Emile Zola "I am here to live out loud."

Congrats & cheers: Balihoo raises $1.5 mil in their first round (they're looking for a biz dev person)

"Any dream you have in life you have to fight for it and go for it, this is how you achieve your destiny and deliver yourself from your fate, that initial life that was given to you but you did not choose it. To do that right you need to do it with heart, not greed."
Guillermo Del Toro


Saw Pan's Labyrinth (Laberinto del Fauno, El) yesterday. Amazing! Del Toro has created an epic motion picture, a rich combination of story, visuals and sound. The film's tag line is tight: "Innocence has a power evil cannot imagine." This is one film you must see in a proper theater, especially one with state-of-the-art sound. Made on a modest production budget of $19 mil, the project's ytd gross is $27.6 mil domestic and $25.9 mil foreign. Nominated for six Oscars. Highly recommended. Please, just go and see it.

"The best combination is a front runner who is certain, deep down, that he's losing, and acts accordingly. The second-best combination is to be ignored by those in search of a front runner as you quietly and aggressively take the risks a front runner would never take."
Seth Godin

Congrats & cheers: Beth Comstock, Jeff Gaspin and Marc Graboff - all have grown up to be presidents (at NBC Universal). Keith Olbermann signing on for four more years with MSNBC (and to think, it started as a three-day temp job). Patricia Smullin, Dean Sorenson, Bob Fox, Eric Rhoads, James Babb, and Gary Chapman all to be honored with the Pioneer Award from the Broadcasters Foundation of America. Michael Gartenberg joins Microsoft - smart, very smart.

The obvious is always the hardest to see: My pal Lee Arnold goes dial-up and it ain't pretty. "I recently spent five days without broadband service...this gave me an opportunity to see how media websites performed for those without access to high speed internet connections. The answer is: not very well." Read Lee's entire post here. Kudos Lee, thanks for the reality check. Get the download times, by connection speed, of your main page, at no charge, here.

Dan Kelley, the rock radio programmer, is now blogging here. Kudos Dan!

"ABC put up what we call a 'lower third' with my name and identity. It has been a longstanding newsroom joke of mine that you are defined by whatever you were doing at the time of a news story. Hence, if you are hit by a car, you are a 'pedestrian'...Well, sure enough, I was listed as 'Steve Safran: Blogger.' There it is. The summary of my life in one word. 'Blogger.' I want to stress that, as a former TV news producer, I had this coming." Steve Safran

Congrats to Steve for being the first to crack the code, break and (with Cory) own the story on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim-Mooninites stunt. Read Steve's 15 hours of fame: my day as a media whore here. Steve's LR colleague Cory Bergman asks the right "after-action" question Any publicity is good publicity, right? Cory's post with comments here. Congrats & Bravo to Steve and Cory! Outstanding coverage. Related: Jaffe tags the "Boston mass-a-scare" as "ugly stuff" and invites your comments here. My sense is Boston, unlike the other DMAs involved, failed to put this stunt into proper perspective, crisis management thin on good judgment calls. Further, the tone of Boston's "response" leads this former reporter to question...did 819, or others involved, "spike" the stunt, after days without notice? A "concerned citizen" call to the police or some other "look at me" stuff, the kind of thing that would demand police attention? A coup de theatre gone wrong? btw, Boston Mooninites is #1 on Technorati as I post this. CNN's Boston storyline here. Boston Globe's Michael Levenson, Maria Cramer and staff write Marketing gambit exposes a wide generation gap here. UPDATE: Turner accepts blame, agrees to pay $1 million via Boston Globe's Michael Levenson, Raja Mishra and staff here

Seth Godin writes on Creativity...

"99% of the time, in my experience, the hard part about creativity isn't coming up with something no one has ever thought of before. The hard part is actually executing the thing you've thought of. The devil doesn't need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics."

Agree with Seth, however, getting "the thing" green lighted is increasingly difficult. While Virgil and Seth are correct - fortune favors the daring ("audentes fortuna iuvat") - the mediocre, the safe, not the daring, gets the majority of green lighting. It was ever thus. The dirty little secret is we are too often working harder to get better at executing ideas of lesser consequence. The "big idea" as defined by the legendary George Lois might be a scary, dangerous experiment. Years ago I engaged George to create a campaign for one of our New York city properties. His "big idea" was brilliant (it reached that certain threshold the great Scot Ogilvy once established: "it takes your breath away"). Knowing George had created the perfect creative solution we set the pitch meeting. As I watched George pitch his amazing idea it became evident, the suits were scared. We later went with another idea. Our boring, safe, researched creative, the one everyone agreed was "fine" and "on message" was executed perfectly...without any meaningful result. My suggestion is we added to the clutter on that one, we helped to raise the noise floor. We have all walked out of a movie theater, seen a billboard, a TV commercial, a POP and said "what were they thinking?" The average executed to perfection is, well, average. Wasn't it also Ogilvy that said you can't bore the customer into buying?

Execution is certainly critical and Seth might well be right that it's the last 99% of the job (Edison arrived at a similar finding "success being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"). However, leadership with the courage to green light the big idea, that 1%, is priceless. The right 1% remains elusive because it has risk and a measure of fight baked into it. The big ideas are out there and they win big. Perhaps the greatest recent success in wealth creation, YouTube, happened only when two young dudes all but said "copyright badges, we don't need no stinking copyright badges"...their execution was daring, messy, users posting copyrighted material created extreme exposure. Lawyers, and other grown ups would have killed their idea at any company of size on the ip issues alone. More than one critic said, before the sale, "these guys are not making money, their gonna get sued, when the copyrighted material comes down their traffic will vanish, their platform is shaky, two kids with a case of red bull could create what they have created over a weekend but it's still not a business." They were right. Nobody liked it but the users. The big idea will out!

LATER: Breaking...Viacom demands that Google pull more than 100K clips from YouTube. Staci is on the story via paidContent here