…

This post is for General Managers, Regional VPs, those of you sitting in — or planning on sitting in one day — those big corner offices.

One of the problems Radio has to deal with is that the people in charge of the product we listen to did not come up on the content side of the business.

They aren’t trying to create anything except revenue.

To these people, listeners are a means to an end, rather than the end itself.

They’re not trying to screw up the experience of listening. They just don’t have any experience in what creates it.

The Sistine Chapel wasn’t a paint-by-number collaboration.

Z100 in New York was not the creation of a programming confab. It was a sound in the head of one man: Scott Shannon.

So post this on the door to your office, or the air studio, or on a big, expensive plaque no one can miss when they walk into your building:

“Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy…

“Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”
~ John Steinbeck, East of Eden