“In the end, I don’t care how customers listen SiriusXM. I only care if they listen. And so they want to listen on their phone, they want to listen through their Sonos device. They want to listen on their car radio through satellite delivered. They want to listen through their car radio through plug-in their phone and/or using Bluetooth with their phone, does not matter to me. What matters to me is that they listen and that they pay.”
~James E. Meyer, CEO, Sirius/XM

Why is it we confuse content creation with content distribution?  People not listening to the radio as much as they used to?  That’s a content creation challenge.  People using devices that can’t access your content, that’s a distribution issue.

Most of us in radio don’t differentiate between content creation and content distribution.  Here’s the sticky side of that issue: once you start creating content specifically for one kind of distribution channel, your creativity suffers, and there’s less interest in what you’re distributing.

Here’s a theory – always concentrate on content creation first.  Compelling content will always find its way to a distribution channel.  Even if you have a plethora of distribution channels, if what you have on them is “ok” you’re going to fail.  The MacBook Air I’m writing this on has more ability to generate content for different distribution channels than existed 50 years ago.  I can create all of the “new media” choices of digital, audio, video and social.

Still, it’s the dreamer sitting in front of the computer, not Steve Jobs’ invention, that creates the compelling content.  As I mentioned recently, we’re too busy tactically to take the time to dream, which is what creates the compelling content.  Without that dreamer, the distribution doesn’t matter.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
~Abraham Lincoln

When you’re walking along the beach, early in the morning, everything past the waves on the beach is invisible.  You know there’s an ocean out there, but due to the fog bank, you can’t see it.  Just like you know there’s a future out there, but you can’t see it.

This is where so many visions fail.  The people involved can’t see past the fog bank, so they avoid anything about the future, missing the people on the small fishing boat and the ocean liner carrying passengers to far away places.  There’s a critical shortage of the Christopher Columbuses, John Glenns and Elon Musks who saw a future and made it happen.

Some of this is a simple vision block, we tell ourselves we don’t have a vision and so concentrate on the tactics that wind up taking us nowhere.  But some of it is also because we’re so tactically oriented that we don’t take the time to dream.  We think we have to be in a state of constant busyness – and you know what they say about a body in motion staying in motion.

Finally, there are those who think that planning gets in the way of a grander scheme to which we’re only a part of.  There’s an almost Biblical ban on strategy because it could get in God’s way.  I could be wrong, but I subscribe to what a famous dreamer, Galileo once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, intellect and reason intended for us to forgo their use.”

The perfect way to predict the future is to create it.  There’s a wonderfully simplistic, strategic sense to that, Abe.