Category Archives: Mentor

January 3, 2016 · 7:44 am

Looking Back at My 1st Year of Blogging

635867993253266683346579856_blog4Hard to believe I started this blog one year ago. It seems like only yesterday. Ironically, it was Sunday, January 3rd – the same date as today’s date.

Those early days were pretty lean when it came to readership, only a couple of folks to a couple of dozen in those first cold and blustery winter months of 2015. Most blogs – like most diet/exercise programs begun with a new year – last about four months. This blog is celebrating its 1st birthday and its readership has grown dramatically. Thank YOU for being a reader.

 Here were my top 3 most read blog posts of 2015:

We Never Called It Content

Larry Lujack, The Real Don Steele, Robert W. Morgan, Dale Dorman, Ron Lundy, Salty Brine, Bob Steele, and so many, many more. These names I’ve dropped are all no longer on the radio. Terrestrial radio anyway. We radio geeks like to think they are now Rockin’ N Rollin’ the hinges off the pearly gates. https://dicktaylorblog.com/2015/09/06/we-never-called-it-content/

Top 3 In-Demand Radio Jobs

What is the future for jobs in radio in our digitally connected world? Three jobs in particular stand out as being in demand right now and look to be still in demand as radio celebrates its 100th Anniversary in the year 2020. The first won’t surprise anyone, the second is a job that only recently became critical and the third is a job that’s been a part of radio since day one. https://dicktaylorblog.com/2015/02/22/top-3-in-demand-radio-jobs/

Why I Fired My Top Salesperson

My students are always stunned when I tell them about the time I fired my top salesperson. “Why would you do that?” they always ask. Today, I’m going to share that story with you.

In today’s competitive world, top performers are usually cut a little slack. There’s nothing really wrong with that, unless it breaks a culture of honesty, fairness and trust.   https://dicktaylorblog.com/2015/11/01/why-i-fired-my-top-salesperson/

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I learned that my readers, while coming from all over the world, are mainly located in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. My readership has grown to near 18,000.

Some of the posts I consider to be some of my most insightful you might have missed, the links are posted below:

https://dicktaylorblog.com/2015/03/15/the-future-of-ad-supported-media/

https://dicktaylorblog.com/2015/09/13/is-radio-ready-for-a-black-swan/

https://dicktaylorblog.com/2015/10/25/the-limitations-of-a-spreadsheet/

https://dicktaylorblog.com/2015/04/05/attention-to-detail/

https://dicktaylorblog.com/2015/10/18/how-do-you-measure-employee-performance/

Posts from this blog have been re-published in Tom Taylor’s NOW – Radio’s Daily Management Newsletter, radioINSIGHT, North American Radio Network, Radio Ink, James Cridland’s newsletter, and RAIN among many others (I know I’m leaving some wonderful publications and people out, my apologies in advance). Thank You for sharing my thoughts.

I’ve been invited to appear on Vlogs and podcasts by Owen Murphy, Ryan Wrecker and Larry Gifford as a direct result of my blog. Thank You too.

Next week I will begin a new year of blogging my thoughts about radio, education and the changes each is working through during the communications revolution caused by the Internet of things (IoT).

I hope you will continue to enjoy reading my posts and learning something from what I share. You’re always invited to share your thoughts in the comments section. I learned at the Wharton School that while no one can predict the future, it is amazing when minds come together and share their perspective of what the future holds, how close to what will happen can be revealed.

Let’s grow together in media mentorship.

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Next week, I will take a look at the plight of the small to mid-size Internet streaming broadcasters’ dilemma in light of the Copyright Royal Board’s rates for 2016-2020 and why what’s happening is not new. It’s déjà vu.

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December 13, 2015 · 9:37 am

Radio – America’s #1 Mass Reach Medium

radio-reaches-245-million-americans-2015-2This was certainly true in the first golden age of radio, that period of time from its birth in 1920 through the mass takeover of television in the 1950s. Once TV came along, radio had to reinvent itself.

 

That reinvention came in the form of Rock ‘N’ Roll, the transistor radio and the car radio. Radio was portable, TV was not. TV took over the living room, but radio took over every other place.

 

In my life, I’ve lived through every new form of technology that was going to be the death of radio. The 8-track tape, the cassette tape, the CB radio, the CD player, the CD changer, the cell phone, the MP3 player, and most recently, the World Wide Web, Internet streaming and wireless broadband.

 

So you might be surprised to learn that at the 2015 annual meeting of the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, Florida attendees learned that when it comes to adults 18+, RADIO reaches 93% of them every week. That’s more than TV, more than smart phones, more than PCs and more than tablets.

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I remember when I got my first GM position. It was a daytime radio station that featured Al Ham’s “Music of YOUR Life” format, big band music for those not familiar with the programming. Yes, my audience was old. But only according to the calendar, but not the way they thought about themselves. Nampa and his corvette

It was always a tough putt with new advertisers, getting across this concept that you are as young as you think. So I wasn’t surprised to learn that one of the sessions talked about “APT.” APT was all about the “Age People Think” not demographics.

 

I’m not sure that lumping people by demographics was ever a sound marketing idea, but like a lot of bad ideas (buying radio on a Cost Per Point basis) in advertising, people do what’s always been done and ignore if it’s a sound way to place advertising.

 

A lot of my radio stations over my career have focused on an older demo. When Ken Dychtwald’s book “Age Wave” came out in 1990, I read it with enthusiasm. Dychtwald told of the massive population and cultural shifts that would be taking place because of the Baby Boom Generation. He put forward how the boomers would shift the epicenter of consumer activity from a focus on youth to the needs, challenges, and aspirations of maturing consumers. Those predictions are playing out today.

 

So again, I wasn’t surprised to read that at the ANA gathering attendees were told that old people were a growth market. In light of the trillion dollars in student loan debt, the millennials are cash challenged in a way that the Boomers are not.

 

I grew up in a Chevy family. Remember those days of yore? Chevy families and Ford families competing for bragging rights as to which drove the better cars?

 

Many marketers would have you believe that we are now stuck in a rut with our product choices and only the young are pliable enough to be swayed to try or change brands. So let’s see how that plays out in my family. I have two older brothers; one drives a Honda and the other a Toyota. How about our kids? Well we have a BMW, Mercedes Benz, Hyundai and Honda. In my case, I drove a Hyundai for the past eight years before switching to a Honda Accord; so much for that concept that once you are stuck in a brand, you stay there for life. Even my toothpaste is not the brand I grew up using.

 

Everything has changed about the world with the exception the way marketing is created and advertising is bought.

 

One of the big changes is that RADIO is back! It’s the massive reach medium that advertisers seek to expose their products and services on, except that they don’t know it.

 

Radio needs to use some frequency and repetition to get the word out.

 

Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that’s where the money was.

 

If you’re an advertiser, you need to advertise where the people are and that’s today’s RADIO.

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December 6, 2015 · 9:28 am

Colleges That Give-up Their FCC License

fcc-logoI recently wrote an article for Radio World about the impact of colleges that sold their student radio station’s FCC license had on the pedagogical program at those institutions. You can read that article in Radio World here.

 

 

Today, I’d like to share with you something else I learned in talking with educators from around the country while researching this article. The FM license in every case connected the student station to the community. It was the heart and soul of the operation. When the license was sold and the station would become an online Internet only radio station it lost that connection.

 

Now the irony is that all of these student radio stations didn’t stop broadcasting over the FM band and then become Internet radio stations. No, they already had been streaming on the Internet and had listeners from all over the world in many cases. So why didn’t that continue to sustain these radio stations?

 

Let me make a comparison to help you understand this a little better. When you buy a magazine, do you read only one article and then toss it away or do you turn all the pages and look at other things in addition to that cover story that first attracted your attention and caused you to purchase the magazine? You read, if only skimming, the entire magazine. You spent time with that publication and became a little more invested in it. If you subscribe to the magazine this would be akin to being a P1 listener to a radio station.

 

When you see an article from a magazine online do you read the whole magazine or just the article that captured your attention and then leave? You do what we all do. It’s one and done. No investment in the magazine, just the article.

 

Well, what I learned is that it apparently isn’t all that much different when it comes to student streaming radio stations. It’s more of a hit and run.

 

There’s also a problem with student online radio stations in that they have limited connection capacity in most cases. That means only a limited number of people can listen to the stream, unless the college makes a big investment in expanding the capacity in the number of listeners can be connected at the same time. This is somewhat solved if a student station goes with a large online aggregator like TuneIn or Live365.

 

But let’s be real, when you enter a store and everything in the place is priced the same – FREE – which would you chose? The best you could find. Good Luck student stations.

 

Contrast that with student radio stations that broadcast over FM radio. What you find is that they are now only competing within the local community of service and in that playing field, have a chance to break through and be heard.

 

Over 92% of Americans 12-years of age and older still have the radio habit and listen every week. When it comes to listening to streaming stations on the Internet the percentage of penetration doesn’t come close. And those that do listen to streaming Internet music are very likely tuned to Pandora, if the current data available about such things is to be believed.

 

Another thing I heard was how more and more of these student radio stations were working to get a LPFM license so they could return to the air on the FM radios in their community.

 

When Zane Lowe was getting ready to launch Apple’s Beats1, he told the trades that a big part of the three months leading up to the launch was spent trying to come up with a better name for the new service than radio. They couldn’t do it.

 

Radio is the brand, because it works.

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November 29, 2015 · 6:36 am

Building Trust

trust-building-big-sizeA couple of weeks ago, I wrote about “Why I Fired My Top Salesperson.” And it all came down to a single reason, trust. I can’t think of one thing a successful leader needs to do more in a business than establish a culture of trust.

 

Leaders influence people. Trust is the foundation upon which the ability to influence others is built.

 

Simon Sinek puts it this way: “Being a good leader is like being a good parent. You catch glimmers of hope when you catch them doing something right, but you really don’t know if you’ve done a good job for like 30-years.”

 

Trust is comprised of two basic components: character and competence. Character means you make decisions that go beyond your own self-interests. Certainly, in firing my top salesperson, that wasn’t going to help my month or quarter. It wasn’t in my own self-interests for the present moment. But knowing that the long-term good of my radio stations was the value I was protecting, and maintaining the trust of the people who I worked with every day, made doing the right thing clear albeit difficult. Competence doesn’t mean having all the answers. Competence means having the experience and knowledge to make decisions that positively impact the performance of the enterprise and the courage to ask for help when you need it. (I always tell people I have an awesome contact file full of brilliant people to call when I need help.)

 

When your people trust your character and believe in your competence, they will follow you wherever you lead them.

 

Being a trusted leader is done with love.

 

I attended Weight Watcher meetings for the first time in my life this year. Like everyone else on the planet I wanted to drop a few pounds, but I also wanted to see if I could pick up any new information about nutrition and living a healthy lifestyle. What I learned was that change occurs by what you consistently do every day. That message was shared by others in the room that had lost lots of weight, all taking the same journey and it was shared with love. Simon Sinek also says when we are surrounded by people who believe what we believe and we feel loved, trust develops.

 

10,000 Hours

 

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book “The Tipping Point” that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to get really good at something. You can’t rush trust building anymore than you can rush how long it takes to make a baby. Babies are born when they are good and ready. And you can’t build trust via email, Facebook, Twitter or any other form of modern day communication. You build trust when people come together through human contact. It’s why webinars lose one of the main benefits of seminars, that being people coming together and meeting one another. (Besides, I don’t know about you, but I’m always doing at least two other things when I’m on a webinar.)

 

Again, when we’re surrounded by people who believe what we believe trust develops.

 

Be Like Ed Koch

 

Ed Koch was a three-time mayor of New York City. Mayor Koch was famous for asking people everywhere he went “How Am I Doing?” He got in their faces and asked. Over and over and over; Mayor Koch asked “How Am I Doing?”

 

You build trust by being consistent.

 

The best teachers teach by sharing their mistakes and what they learned. People don’t connect with perfection. People connect with people who’ve been there, screwed it up, learned from it and shared the experience. Real courage is being able to share your mistakes with others and like who you are in the process of doing that.

 

When you reveal yourself in this way, you demonstrate what you believe and value.

 

In other words, you build trust.

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November 22, 2015 · 7:50 am

Being Grateful

15There are times when the stresses that are part of everyday life can occupy a place way beyond their level of importance in the grand scheme of things. Its times like those that you need to take a time-out and remember all the things in your life you have to be grateful about.

 

This year, I’m grateful for three wonderful grand children that are all happy, healthy and developing into unique individuals.

 

I’m grateful for their parents who make their children their first priority and love them with all their heart and soul.

 

I’m grateful that my two sons have set exciting and meaningful goals for their lives and in so doing are working hard to make our world a safer and better place for all of us.

 

I’m thankful for my two older brothers that always have been there for me through ups and downs, thick and thin.

 

I’m grateful that I’ve come to accept myself for exactly who I am, while still having boundless curiosity and a desire to never stop learning and growing.

 

I’m grateful that I’ve learned how to slow down. Life is meant to be savored. It’s not getting to the finish line first but about enjoying the journey.

 

I’m grateful for having enough. Less is more. Too much of anything is usually toxic.

 

I’m grateful for each day when I can add more value to the world than I consume.

 

I’m grateful for learning that every situation provides an opportunity to learn something; even the difficult ones, life goes by so fast.

 

I’m grateful that a career in radio that I started in the 10th grade in high school would allow me to pay for my college education, graduate school and raise a family. It’s a career that was all I ever wanted to do besides one day paying-it-forward through teaching the next generation of broadcasters.

 

I’m grateful that I finally started a blog this past year. It’s been one of the most personally rewarding and enriching things I’ve undertaken this past year.

 

I’m grateful for all the wonderful people I’ve met on this journey called life, people who were only strangers until we said “hello,” and then became friends for life.

 

One of my mentors, Zig Ziglar said: “You can get anything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” I’ve tried to live those words every day.

 

I have so many things to be grateful for this Thanksgiving 2015. I’m sure you do too.

 

Remember you may make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give.

 

Today, I’m grateful for YOU.

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November 15, 2015 · 6:30 am

Bring Back the Radio Hackers

We never called them that back in the early days of radio’s reinvention period after the birth of television in the 1950s, but that’s what they were.

Radio from the beginning basically was a medium that killed Vaudeville. Radio enticed the performers of Vaudeville to bring their acts to this new mass medium. The sales pitch went something like this: you won’t have to travel every day of the year, sleep on trains and eat your meals on the run. When you move your act to radio, you will be able to go home every night to your family and have a “normal” life. And you’ll make more money!

Not all performers would make this transition. The downside to moving their act to radio was that no longer could they have one act that they could perform night after night. On the radio, they needed a new act every performance. That’s a BIG CHANGE.

When television came along, the successful radio acts moved to TV and radio needed a new idea.

Enter the Hackers

 Alan Freed would hack the term Rock ‘N’ Roll and become the first famous disc jockey introducing a new venue for radio.

Todd Storz and Gordon McLendon aka “the Maverick of Radio” would hack the idea of Top 40 radio introducing a tighter playlist and higher repetition of the biggest hits. After observing teenagers playing the same songs over and over in a juke box.

Better Practices

 Today’s world is infested with the concept of “Best Practices.” It can be a stifling thing when it comes to creativity.

Today’s radio was born out of hackers that were constantly thinking up “Better Practices.” Ron Jacobs and Bill Drake certainly did at Boss Radio in Los Angeles with 93 KHJ. John Rook did it in Chicago with both WLS and WCFL. Rick Sklar did it in New York at Music Radio 77 WABC. Plus there were so many others in all size markets. Radio was different everywhere you listened because it was being hacked in so many wonderful ways. It was exciting to turn on your radio and hear what was going to come out next.

Insanity

 The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. We have a lot of that kind of stinking thinking today and I’m sure you’ve heard all the reasons for why this is the path some of our biggest broadcasters are taking. As the radio business grew from a mom and pop business to the behemoths of today a ritual of “Best Practices” replaced hacking.

Today’s Economy is a Hacker Economy

 We live in a world where it seems everything has been turned upside down by the World Wide Web, the Internet and mobile Apps. The power is shifting from the big to the nimble; the hackers. Learn to hack or be attacked by those that hack.

Radio is not exempt from this shift. And it doesn’t have to lose.

Radio has what everyone else would love to own, a mass audience. Radio today is delivering the largest mass audience of all the mediums.

It’s why every entity trying to play in the audio medium calls itself “radio.” Pandora Radio, Spotify Radio, TuneIn Radio, RadioTunes, Beats 1 Radio etc. What radio folks have that these folks don’t have is a broadcast signal that is ubiquitous and a listening habit that has been cultivated over many years.

However, what those pure plays have that radio is missing are hackers.

Radio needs to stimulate agility, creativity and take risks.

Stop thinking about where you want to be in 5 years and start thinking about what problems you want to solve most right now. The winners will be those most able to adapt.

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November 8, 2015 · 8:45 am

Memories of Pinky

PinkyShortly after I arrived in Atlantic City to begin my 13-year run as general manager of WIIN/WFPG, I would be interviewed by Atlantic City Magazine about some of the changes I was making at the radio stations.

WIIN was a news station with a five person news staff, a full-time sports director, even a plane in the sky over the South Jersey Shore doing traffic reports in season. WFPG was the iconic Bonneville Beautiful Music formatted radio station with an hour I.D. that many remember for the sound of ocean waves, sea gulls and buoy bells. During my interview with the magazine I was asked about Pinky and his WOND radio show Pinky’s Corner, to which I replied something to the effect that he wasn’t on my radar and what he did made no difference on my operation; basically a one-liner in a much longer story on South Jersey radio.

By the time I arrived in South Jersey Pinky had been doing his radio show longer than I had been sucking up oxygen as part of the human race.

Sunday morning November 1st I woke up to the news that Pinky had passed away Saturday night at the age of 88. He had retired only earlier this year after heart surgery in May had caused Pinky to call in sick for the first time in his 57-year radio work history.

I have so many memories of Pinky.

As a competitor I remember calling on advertisers that told me they bought ads in Pinky’s show so he would never say anything negative about them. Hard to argue with that reason. I remember Pinky broadcasting his radio show by the cash registers as I was checking out with my groceries at the supermarket. I remember the time when Pinky was without a remote location sponsor to do his show from, so he took the latest technology – a bag phone – and hopped in the back of Atlantic City police cars and did his radio broadcast live on patrol, the kind of thing that COPS does on TV.

My radio career would take me to the Midwest and one day my office phone would ring and it would be Howard Green, the owner of WOND, home of Pinky’s Corner. Howard said to me “Dick Taylor, what would it take for me to get you back to Atlantic City and working for me?” I said, “Make me an offer.” He did. I took it. I returned to Atlantic City.

Because Pinky always did his radio show from a remote location, he was usually never in the radio station broadcast center. One day, I saw Pinky walking towards my 3rd floor corner office. I said “Hi Pinky,” to which Pinky said “I have no confidence your ability to manage this radio station,” then turned around left. It’s always nice to receive that kind of positive encouragement from your team when you start a new job.

I would learn those words were due to that Atlantic City magazine article of over a decade earlier. Pinky had an incredible memory. He remembered everything. He even did his radio commercials from memory for his clients who sponsored Pinky’s Corner.

When we were approaching Pinky’s 45th year on-the-air, I conspired with his remote sponsor to throw a big 45th anniversary celebration surprise party during his live radio show. The casino folks agreed and it was a surprise that I’m sure Pinky never expected to have occurred on my watch.

Another thing I remember about Pinky was that during my time as the WOND manager, Pinky wouldn’t say the call letters or the frequency of the radio station. No matter how I cajoled Pinky he would not change his ways. I commissioned a research study of the people who listened to Pinky’s Corner and found that 60% of the people who listened to Pinky every day did not know the call letters of the radio station his show was broadcast over. But I still couldn’t change Pinky’s mind.

Frustrated I went to the company owner, Howard Green, and asked for advice. Howard’s response was priceless. “Don’t ask me” he said. “Pinky one time had t-shirts made up with his picture drawn on them and the words ‘Listen to Pinky’s Corner’.” Howard said when he saw them he said to Pinky “Pinky, you didn’t put the call letters or the frequency of the radio station on your t-shirts.” To which Pinky replied “and you didn’t pay for the t-shirts.”

Since Atlantic City uses unaided diary recall I decided to put the WOND call letters in every station break and between every commercial during Pinky’s Corner I could squeeze them into. Then Howard Green became ill while on an ocean cruise, lapsed into a coma and died. The next day I turned on Pinky’s Corner to hear what Pinky would say about his friend and employer of over four decades and what struck me most was that Pinky was saying the station call letters everywhere. And that would continue from that point forward. I guess I’ll never know the reason why that change occurred.

I’m happy to say that Pinky and I became friends, who respected one another’s abilities and love of the radio business. I always enjoyed seeing him on my annual trips back to Atlantic City for the New Jersey Broadcasters Association conventions.

For so many people in South Jersey, they don’t remember a time when Pinky wasn’t on their radio. He truly was one-of-a-kind.

Thank You Pinky for making WOND, like the slogan said, “Radio You Can Depend On.”

WOND LOGO

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November 1, 2015 · 8:21 am

Why I Fired My Top Salesperson

My students are always stunned when I tell them about the time I fired my top salesperson. “Why would you do that?” they always ask. Today, I’m going to share that story with you.

In today’s competitive world, top performers are usually cut a little slack. There’s nothing really wrong with that, unless it breaks a culture of honesty, fairness and trust.

If you’re in any kind of sales, you know that one of the ways management motivates and stimulates sales people are through the use of contests. Sales people are competitive folks and the best like to win. I know I do. In fact, I have a picture that has hung the wall of every office I’ve ever occupied. It says “If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.” Lead Dog

Well this latest sales contest was coming down to the wire and the sales people were running neck and neck. It was having every employee in the whole radio station wondering which one of the sales people would capture the top prize and finish first.

On the final day of the contest, just before the 5 o’clock bell rang signifying the end of the contest, my top sales person came running into my office with a contract that put him in first place. We all congratulated him on his win and went home to enjoy the weekend.

On Monday morning, my traffic and business department people came to me with that signed contract along with other signed contracts from that same client and it was quite apparent something was fishy. The signature turned in just before the bell on Friday was quite different than all the others.

I called my top sales person into my office along with my sales manager and we asked this person if the client had actually signed this contract. After some hemming and hawing, he said “NO.” He explained that the client was on a cruise and wouldn’t be back in the office until today and he was planning to go over there and get his approval for the advertising. He said that he knew the client would definitely agree to the advertising. I knew he would too. And that’s why it was so sad when I told him he was fired.

Enforcing a culture of honesty, fairness and trust is hard.

The only way you can maintain that culture is by understanding that you have to fire people no matter what their performance has been. You can’t build a great organization unless you commit to doing just that.

Unlike many other radio stations in my market, I had a waiting line of top sales people wanting to join my team. A great culture helps you attract the most talented people.

A half-dozen years later I was recruited back into this same market from the Midwest and had the task of launching a brand new radio format. I needed to hire people for every position.

The good news is that because of my reputation for honesty, fairness and trust, I attracted many in-market pros when I hung out the “Help Wanted” sign.

One of the people who came to see me and apply for a position on my new sales team was the top salesperson I had fired years ago. He was employed in sales at another radio station in the metro and was doing quite well. Most of the accounts he had on-the-air at his current station had already been assigned to sales people I had already hired. He didn’t care. He wanted to come back and work with me. We reviewed the past that led up to his termination and he swore he had learned his lesson and that it would never happen again. I believed him. It never did.

In his first 30-days, he sold over $100,000.00 in advertising. Most of it paid cash-in-advance. He once again was my top salesperson. I believe in second chances. I also believe in committing to the type of culture that wins with honesty, fairness and trust.

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October 25, 2015 · 9:08 am

The Limitations of a Spreadsheet

This is probably going to make me sound ancient, but I remember doing my radio station budget with a calculator, a #2 pencil and a Big Pink eraser. I wasn’t alone; everyone did their budgets this way once upon a time.

In those early days of computers entering the radio station, the first department I remember computerizing was the traffic department. Oh, I so remember our doing that transition.

We were going into our first holiday weekend, that time when traffic needs to prepare five traffic logs for each radio station to get through a three-day weekend. What was supposed to make us fast and efficient saw us spending time going into Saturday to get the logs done. I remember the look on my traffic director’s face. It was one of those “are you going to make me do this again” kinds of looks. (I did)

Computers weren’t really all that fast in those early days, but the promise was clearly there that this would be a better way over time.

Seeing budget time coming up, I said to my business manager, let’s take a course at the local community college in Excel and do our budget this year on a computer. She loved the idea and the two of us went back to school to learn how to use Excel spreadsheets.

We cranked out our first budget and it was amazing. It was clean, easily read and best of all it showed that we were going to have a great year for the company.

Everything was great, until my boss, one of the two owners of the group showed up to review my budget. He was NOT impressed that we had computerized the process. He basically said I don’t care how it looks or what it says, but is it right. He then proceeded to take a calculator out of his pocket and crunch the numbers. Very quickly he found all kinds of errors.

Color me embarrassed.

The bad news was we hadn’t mastered the Excel spreadsheet in our first attempt doing our station budget on this computer program. The good news was we were able to fix all the problems and hand my boss a revised budget for him to take back on the plane to the home office.

The following year, the home office announced that all radio stations in the group were to do their station budget on Excel.

Spreadsheet programs, as it turns out, can allow us to manage a lot of numbers and monitor what’s going on in our businesses. They are invaluable, but not omniscient.

Results can’t be engineered. Just simply knowing the inputs doesn’t allow one to always accurately predict the outputs.

It was Benoit Mandelbrot who first said that economic analysts were too dependent on “Joseph effects” which means things happen in a continuous and predictable model and turning a blind eye to “Noah effects” which creates chaos and completely destroys those same models.

Another way of saying it is that when something doesn’t fit your nice little model, just ignore it. That’s never been a solid plan. It’s why people don’t often see stock market crashes coming or innovations like the iPhone, the Internet and WiFi, but these things always happen and when they do they steer the course of history.

Remember the financial crisis of 2008? Mandelbrot understood how things like this happened. (Noah effects)

In the world of radio today, we have BEATS 1, Pandora, Spotify and others. Over-the-air broadcasters did not see these “Noah effects” on their data driven and ROI focused spreadsheets. They were living in “Joseph world.”

In his new book “Team of Teams” General Stanley McChrystal tells the story of when he took over Special Forces in Iraq. Specials Forces was winning every battle but America was losing the war. McChrystal learned that the problem wasn’t that his teams weren’t doing their jobs right but that they weren’t doing the right jobs.

McChrystal says “In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.” For many radio companies the problem isn’t that they’re not performing to plan, but that the plan itself is flawed. It often is based on assumptions that don’t hold true in every radio market the company operates in.

The answer to this problem is to hire great leaders and let them lead.

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October 18, 2015 · 8:20 am

How Do You Measure Employee Performance?

Whether you’re the boss doing the evaluation or the employee being evaluated, it’s not a fun time on either side of the process. Evaluations never are, except maybe when you are rated “fabulous” by a boss who loves you.

Unfortunately, many bosses feel the need to find something wrong with an employee when doing their evaluation. The reason, I suspect, is to show that they know more than the employee or to give the employee something to work for in the coming year or to tamp down any employee expectations for getting a raise in pay.

Also the size of the organization, often determines how many questions make up the evaluation process. Some mom and pop operations probably avoid them altogether.

EMPLOYEE EVALUATIONS GET A FAILING GRADE

Studies have shown that 60 to 90 percent of employees, including managers, dislike the whole evaluation process.  Worse, the evaluation process has been shown to be ineffective, unsatisfactory and unreliable, and contribute nothing to making positive changes going forward.

So why does any organization do employee evaluations? Because they’ve always been done? Because every organization does them? Because (fill in the blank)?

Not very satisfying answers.

BETTER EMPLOYEE EVALUATIONS

But the Harvard Business Review recently published a new way Deloitte is doing these dreaded annual reviews.   And I really like the concept.  Let me give you the “Reader’s Digest” version, but I encourage you to read about it in more detail.

The basic problem with employee evaluations is that they really tell us more about the person doing the evaluation than they tell us about the person being evaluated. That’s just messed up!

Ashley Goodall, director of leader development at Deloitte Services and Marcus Buckingham (author of the book “First Break All The Rules” which I recommend you read as well), worked on the employee evaluation redesign at Deloitte.

What they came up with is so simple, but beta test results show it to be effective too.

The new evaluation process contains four simple questions. That’s right, only four. The first two questions are ranked on a scale from one to five; from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The other two questions are answered with a simple “yes” or “no.”

So what are the four questions? They are these:

  1. Given what I know about this person’s performance, and if it were my money, I would award this person the highest possible compensation increase and bonus.

  2. Given what I know about this person’s performance, I would always want him or her on my team.

  3. This person is at risk for low performance.

  4. This person is ready for promotion today.

What do you think? I think it’s powerful.

But whether you adopt this concept or not, can we all agree that the employee evaluation process is due for a much needed overhaul?

What’s your new plan for evaluating your employees?

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