|
I saw an amazing thing on Sunday.
Hundreds of millionaire professionals willingly
gave up a tool of their trade and replaced it will something that on
any other day, in any other circumstance, would subject them to
ridicule and harassment from their co-workers.
They wore pink.
Sunday was a special Mother’s Day at fifteen
ballparks across the country as Major League Baseball joined forces
to raise money for breast cancer research. The players demonstrated
their support by wearing pink wrist bands and using pink bats. Some
wore pink batting helmets and pink caps.
If someone had tried to get major league ballplayers to wear pink
just for the sake of wearing pink it would have never happened.
But wearing pink wasn’t the point. Mom was the
point. Sister, wife, daughter, grandmother was the point. On
Mother’s Day five years ago our family got up before dawn to fly
from a family wedding in Las Vegas to Arlington, Texas, to watch our
dear friend and former neighbor Joni throw out the first pitch
before a Texas Rangers’ game. She, her family, and the entire
section of fans we sat with were there to celebrate her surviving
breast cancer. And we all wore pink.
Author-preacher-broadcaster-theologian and
brilliant communicator Steve Brown puts it this way, “Almost
anything of any importance is a side benefit of something else. If
you’re searching for happiness, for instance, you probably won’t
find it. But if you’re doing something else (like serving others),
happiness comes along.”
Hugh MacLeod says, “At the center of every human soul is the intense
longing to be closer to God; an idea that can empathize with that is
powerful.”
If you’ll be clear in communicating your
station’s “big idea”, then which tools to use, which “pink bat” in
other words, can be chosen based upon how effective a tool it is,
not based upon someone’s personal agenda for pink bats.
To put it in terms of strategic thinking, decide
your station’s strategy first, then choose the tactics based upon
which is most effective for executing that strategy.
What’s “the idea” behind your radio station?
Is that idea something that is in the center of every human soul?
Or are you trying to force your listeners use a pink bat?
John is a partner in Goodratings
Strategic Services, and has been a successful major market disc
jockey and program director for such companies as CBS, Cap Cities,
Westinghouse, Sandusky, Gannett, and Alliance during his 38 year
broadcast career. John joined Goodratings’ partner Alan Mason in
1999.
|
