The views expressed by Carol Archer do not necessarily

reflect the opinions of All That Jazz.  But often they do.

The Straight Skinny

 

 

The Single Most Important Thing

 

 

By Carol Archer

But my purpose today is to tell you the single most important thing you can do is to change everything we've lived through over the past 25 years. In order to succeed in our business, in order to create something that will have lasting value for the next 25 years, we must be both original and unique. In order to be original and unique, we must take risks, because everything truly original and unique could as easily fail as succeed. We must risk failure to find genius. Unfortunately, our business has been especially unforgiving of failure over the past 25 years.

 

We absolutely must have innovation and originality to succeed going forward, yet we have systematically removed those most willing to try new ideas. So the single most important thing you can do right now is to make your people feel secure. Make failure acceptable. Hire the most creative, unmanageable thinker you can find. Give him or her one of your stations, a real budget, and more importantly, your personal support.

 

Remove the political minefields and layers of management that sap creatives. Don't let the bureaucracy stifle the innovation. Keep your VP or President of Programming away from this person at all costs and see what happens. If the experiment is a total failure, give this person another station in another market, and try again. Risk it. The single most important thing you can do to help radio right now is to do everything within your power to make every employee you have feel secure.

 

The only way you can do that is to stop punishing failure, stop firing people to save money, and reward creativity and innovation wherever you find it. Make all of your employees thankful they work for your company, because it's a company that actually invests in its people. [Are] you up for that challenge?

 

As always, I welcome your feedback. Please contact me at jazzdolphingirl@gmail.com.

 

Have a great week and stay smooth.

 

Copyright Carol Archer 2010.