If You Can Touch It, It May Not Be Real

The world is flat, wrote Tom Friedman. The earth's skin is stretching, continents are adrift, and markets are fragmenting. Product offerings are multiplying before our eyes. Welcome to the age of "brainwork," where entertainment midst throngs of other fields, has been pulled into the space of fickle illusions and the impermanent.

Trend-finders in think-tanks are peaking over the horizon, not at all sure about what lies there. We're seeing this through the machinations of industry monoliths like iHeart, Cumulus and ESPN; groping to forge a better course. This movement toward survival-strategy is not really new, nor is it trendy. As far back as the Eighties, cutting-edge companies such as Ross Perot's EDS were realizing that there was no safe harbor from the oncoming storm, so EDS retooled its $7 billion annual revenue stream and their 72,000 employees into teams of 10. These teams were assigned the task of undoing the establishment, and rocking the boat long before it needed to be rocked. It worked like a commando landing. Perot taught us something else, though we wonder if the lesson stuck.

A while back during Perot's brief flirtation with General Motors at the height of frustration over GM's plodding serpentine manner of arriving at solutions, Perot made this comparison. "At General Motors when someone sees a snake crawling around, they form a committee to hire a consultant on killing snakes. At EDS if we see a snake on the floor, we kill it." A typical graphic Perot Texas perspective ... refreshing nonetheless.

Today's media competition is a fluid asymmetrical war of motion where success depends on developing your people and teams who can anticipate trends, beat competitors to solutions, and above all, respond to customer needs. And if you're thinking, "That's stuff for larger markets to worry about," you'd better be watch your back! For any of us in radio, that means two sets of customers -- listeners and advertising clients. Fail with either and you fail. Market rank and corporate logo are irrelevant.

In today's environment the secret of strategy is not the structure of your company or its markets, but the dynamics of their behavior. As we recently suggested to attendees at a state association fly-in, "either radio's devaluation of programming is finished ... or we are."

Too many companies insist on clinging to the institutional icons where CEOs are the "chief organizers." In fact, shouldn't it be just the opposite? Today's manager had better think about becoming the chief disorganizer so as to challenge your company leaders to avoid the trap of safety. If you see a bunch of people in your organization spending a lot of time trying to prevent something from going wrong, you know that while they may be successful at it, not much new or powerful will come from it.

If your company is willing to break itself up into intelligent creative pieces, toss away the "but we've always done it this way"smoke in exchange for an aggressive, leaner, shared-authorship of plans and execution unseen and untried. You can start having a lot more fun than the guys down the street which includes ratings and revenue.