Becoming Irreplaceable

Rule One: Don't follow the crowd.

I subscribe to Seth Godin's blog because he always has interesting content, and it's usually brief.

A few months ago he featured a quote from Andrew Carnegie that I saved:

"Take away my people but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factory floors. Take away my factories but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory."

Is there one large consolidated radio company in America operating on this principle?

Seriously, if you know one please share with us in the Comments section below.

Great radio stations have always been centered around great talent, whether it be management talent, like Mickey Luckoff at KGO ...programming talent, like Steve Rivers at KIIS ... or on-air talent, like Ron Chapman on KVIL.

For two decades, radio has been trying to grow by getting smaller, by cutting the very talent that made stations great in the first place. PPM is accelerating this trend.

If your station can easily replace the talent inside it, you've got the wrong talent!

The whole point is to have talent so unique they are irreplaceable at any cost.

The alternative is a future racing inexorably towards: cheapest.

When you show clients, listeners, and your own employees you don't value your own product, how can you expect them to value it?