Idea is just step one
Thu, March 04, 2010 Filed in: Television
“Ideas without execution is just hallucination” so a great senior executive once told me. The more out-of-the-box the idea is, the more you need experience to execute.
One of the great things about a company I once worked for was most of the people were new to the job they were doing. Hired for something else, then moved for one reason or another. The magic of not having any baggage, at looking at everything for the first time is magical. It was a wonderfully fertile ground of new ideas. The bad thing was, well...many people were given vast responsibility and authority with little knowledge of how to get the job done. The challenging part for those with experience was to not discourage the newbie with reality. Instead, the experienced individuals were charged with being “the adult”, unofficially, with making sure the project succeeds, then stand back after and watch the newbie enjoy the accolades. Or the “adults” would suffer the consequences if anything went wrong since they “knew better”. A bad situation? Maybe. But for me, the best part was the handful of the experienced “adults”, and how this small group would make it happen time after time after time.
One project was to find a way to broadcast Presidential Debates a new way. Being a company with limited resources, we were not about to assemble a set, plop down a host and have them talk. And why would we anyway? Twitter was the up and coming cool technology so the idea came down to add near-real-time tweets to the pool feed of the debate. But not the CNN way of point-a-camera-at-a-plasma screen. We would do something with some art, creativity, lottsa style and class.
With a new senior engineering management from the web-side of content creation, the direction chosen was Flash as a broadcast graphics maker. The beauty of this was we had the genius in-house mind (one of the “adults) who could build custom apps to pull text, avatars and location information from the twitter stream, send it to a moderation platform to keep things civil, and then out the back of a Mac where we’d key it all in the production switcher. We could also manipulate the the display of the tweets on-air in real time so that it just looked cool. Groundbreaking at the time.
This is where that “experience vs. ideas” challenge worked like a charm. In the weeks going into this show, there were endless meeting about concept...font colors...where people would sit in the control room. Great brain storming meetings. Unfortunately, the brain storming continued, few decision made. The person running the project was brilliant with her ideas, but had no television experience. She would be the Executive Producer of a national broadcast yet she lacked the experience to know when it was time to decide, or sometimes what to decide. Meetings turned into a “rolling of the eyes” festival as the experienced “adults” quietly listened and waiting. No arguments. Contained frustration.
Then the time came. As if silently communicating telepathically, the “adults” ended a meeting a few days before air saying, “ok, this is what I am going to deliver for you...” And that was it. Total professionalism. A simple “I can do this, but I need to start working on this today if you want this for the show.” Deadline set. And off the adults went.
Then, the “adults” delivered. Perfectly. Professionally. They trained a new Executive Producer who went off to enjoy the glow of success, then went on to the next project and did it all over again.
One project was to find a way to broadcast Presidential Debates a new way. Being a company with limited resources, we were not about to assemble a set, plop down a host and have them talk. And why would we anyway? Twitter was the up and coming cool technology so the idea came down to add near-real-time tweets to the pool feed of the debate. But not the CNN way of point-a-camera-at-a-plasma screen. We would do something with some art, creativity, lottsa style and class.
With a new senior engineering management from the web-side of content creation, the direction chosen was Flash as a broadcast graphics maker. The beauty of this was we had the genius in-house mind (one of the “adults) who could build custom apps to pull text, avatars and location information from the twitter stream, send it to a moderation platform to keep things civil, and then out the back of a Mac where we’d key it all in the production switcher. We could also manipulate the the display of the tweets on-air in real time so that it just looked cool. Groundbreaking at the time.
This is where that “experience vs. ideas” challenge worked like a charm. In the weeks going into this show, there were endless meeting about concept...font colors...where people would sit in the control room. Great brain storming meetings. Unfortunately, the brain storming continued, few decision made. The person running the project was brilliant with her ideas, but had no television experience. She would be the Executive Producer of a national broadcast yet she lacked the experience to know when it was time to decide, or sometimes what to decide. Meetings turned into a “rolling of the eyes” festival as the experienced “adults” quietly listened and waiting. No arguments. Contained frustration.
Then the time came. As if silently communicating telepathically, the “adults” ended a meeting a few days before air saying, “ok, this is what I am going to deliver for you...” And that was it. Total professionalism. A simple “I can do this, but I need to start working on this today if you want this for the show.” Deadline set. And off the adults went.
Then, the “adults” delivered. Perfectly. Professionally. They trained a new Executive Producer who went off to enjoy the glow of success, then went on to the next project and did it all over again.
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