Ted Turner and Me

You want your ten minutes?

Most people spend their lives thinking about or talking about what they are going to do, but few actually do anything.

This is because no one ever taught them what to do.

When we go to school, we are not taught how to take an action on our own.  Rather, school teaches us to obey the rules.  Public education in the United States was a function of the introduction of the factory system.  Like so much of our world, it was also a function of the Industrial Revolution.

The new factories needed workers. And Factory work had a few requirements – show up on time, do what you are told, take lunch break, go back to work. Go home.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, both in Britain and in the US, most people were agrarian. Their rhythms of work and life were dictated by nature and by the seasons. This did not go well with factory work. So their children had to be educated to be good factory workers.

Public schools were the perfect answer.  Arrive on time or get a demerit.  Change classes at the bells.  Break for lunch.  Back to the bell-driven system.  And you got an A if you did exactly as you were told to do. Manufacture the multiplication tables. Manufacture the history of America.  Make me a spelling list.

When you graduated you were ready for factory work. What you were not ready for was to take control of your own life. You were ready to obey. Not to innovate.

So innovative behaviour does not come naturally to most people because no one ever told them how to do it.

Like anything else, it isn’t so hard once you know what to do.

The first rule is be bold. Don’t be afraid. And above all, don’t be afraid to take a risk and fail.  Failure is the greatest teacher in the world.  In fact, I think it is fair to say that nothing succeeds like failure.

There is nothing worse than someone who has never failed because it means that they have never pushed themselves beyond their comfort zone.  Failing is pushing against the edge. Fail, learn and go back again.

We have an inherent fear of failure, another by-product of the factory educational system.  We are taught from the very first grade to fear failure.  We always want an A. We always want to complete the task exactly as we were told to do it.

This is great if you are assembling flanges or Ford Broncos, but it is really bad if you are trying something new.  Our fear of failure makes us risk averse.

Inherent in our DNA is the deep seated belief that there is still that Great Nun In The Sky who is going to come out of nowhere and smack our hands with a ruler for stepping outside the boundaries of accepted behavour. This also cripples us and makes us fearful of taking a risk.

Here’s the good news: There is no Great Nun In The Sky.

In fact, if you try something and fail, no one really cares. So go ahead. Try.

Many years ago, I thought I had a pretty good idea on how  to run a TV newsroom much more cost effectively. But who was I? I had not spent years in TV newsrooms. I just had an idea.

So I wrote a letter to Ted Turner, who was then running CNN.

I didn’t know him and he sure as heck had never heard of me. I was no one.

But I wrote anyway.

It was a short letter, only three paragraphs. But I got to the point right away.  I said,  ‘you make television all wrong’.  I said, ‘I know a better way to do this’. Then I said, ‘you give me 10 minutes, and I will give you the world – or whatever part of it you don’t own already.’

Then I mailed the letter.

Who knows?

Three days later my phone rang.

It was Ted Turner.

“You want your 10 minutes, you got ‘em. You be in my office tomorrow morning at 9 am”. Then he hung up the phone.

The next morning I was in his office at 9 am.

And there he was.

He looked at me and he looked at his watch.

“Go” he said.

“You make television all wrong”, I said. “You do it in a crazy and expensive way.  Every one of your reporters should carry a small video camera and shoot all their own stuff.”

He was looking at his watch.

Then he looked up.

“You’re right”, he said. “I know…”

“I know how to cut your staffing and increase your coverage of the world all at the same time…”

“Stop!” he said.

I thought my time was up.

Then he turned to his assistant.

“Get me Pat Mitchell”.

Pat Mitchell ran CNN in Atlanta.

The assistant came back in.  “She says she’s in a meeting”.

Turner went nuts.

Screaming.

“You tell her she works for me, God damn it”…

In an instant Pat Mitchell was on the phone.

“Yes?????”

“I got this Michael Rosenblum here in my office” he said.

“He got this idea on how to make TV news with those little home video cameras”….

He hung up the phone and turned to me.

“You get on a plane now and you go down to Atlanta and see Pat Mitchell and you tell her I sent you”.

Then he came over to me. He’s a big guy.

Then he smacked me on the shoulder.

Pow!

“You a smart Jew”, he said.

“You gonna make me a pile of money”.

And that was how I met Ted Turner….and Pat Mitchell.