But there’s a lot more to this media pioneer and visionary than meets the eye, and Call Me Ted, his 2008 autobiography, lays it all on the line. This book provides a unique, behind-the-scenes look at an extraordinary life spent in pursuit of corporate and personal goals. 

In Call Me Ted (Grand Central Publishing), Turner writes in a breezy, almost cavalier manner and he pulls no punches in separating fact from fiction. From Turner’s earliest days at the helm of the billboard company that he inherited from his father, right up until the time he was forced out of Time Warner, there is something almost predestined about the rise of Turner’s career. 

Here are 10 lessons I learned from Call Me Ted, which might be helpful in your business or life. 

1. Set your goals so high that you can never achieve them in your lifetime.
2. When faced with setbacks in life, hard work and perseverance will help you to get you through the tough times.
3. Surround yourself with talented people and get out of their way. Ted believed in letting people do their jobs without interference. 
4. Find a hobby outside of work to give your life balance. Turner was a passionate and competitive sailor, whose team won many prestigious races, including the coveted America’s Cup in 1977.
5. Figure out where your industry is headed in five or ten years and plan to get there ahead of your competitors.
6. Believe in yourself. In the late 1970s, people close to Turner thought he was crazy for wanting to establish a 24-hour cable news network (even ABC, CBS, NBC thought the idea wouldn’t work) 
7. Form cordial relationships with suppliers and competitors. You never know when you’ll need their help, or vice versa.
8. When you own an asset, your primary job should be to maximize its value.
9. Create an atmosphere of fun and excitement at work and at play. People liked working for Turner because he was exciting to be around.  
10. Use your resources to make the world a better place. Turner’s efforts in promoting peace, his environmentalism and his philanthropy are as inspiring as they are admirable.

                    

Technorati Tags: Achievement, Autobiography, Cable News Network, Call Me Ted, CNN, Corporate image, Media company, Media pioneers, Self promotion, Ted Turner, Time Warner, United Nationsl

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I liked Ms. Louise’s comment about the real purpose of a YouTube channel, which isn’t to attract hundreds of thousands of viewers (although high viewership is a good thing). More importantly, it’s to connect with new customers, suppliers and partners. Creating a YouTube channel is all about putting you into contact with people who are interested in working with you. 

Watch this video and learn how it’s done.

                    

Technorati Tags: Creating a YouTube channel, Marketing & branding, Social networking, Video marketing, YouTube

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The novel is a present day morality tale, where both friends are faced with making decisions that will profoundly affect their personal and professional lives. The story is okay, although it’s not one of McEwan’s best works. What captivated me was the author’s use of language – it soars. 

To illustrate my point, here’s a sentence that describes part of an unfinished musical score: 

“The ancient stone steps had been climbed, the wisps of sound had melted away like mist, his new melody, darkly scored in its first lonely manifestation for a muted trombone, had gathered around itself rich orchestral textures of sinuous harmony, then dissonance and whirling variations that spun way into space, never to reappear, and had now drawn itself up in a process of consolidation, like an explosion seen in reverse, funneling inwards to a geometrical point of stillness; then the muted trombone again, and then, with a hushed crescendo, like a giant drawing breath, the final and colossal restatement of the melody (with one intriguing and as yet unsolved difference) which gathered pace, and erupted into a wave, a racing tsunami of sound reaching an impossible velocity, then tearing up, higher and higher, and when it seemed beyond human capability, higher yet, and at last toppling, breaking and crashing vertiginously down to shatter on the hard safe ground of the home key of C minor.” 

This is why McEwan is such a pro – because he writes sentences like that. He shows a level of craftsmanship that is far above the rest of us scribbling hacks. 

As you work through another day meeting deadlines and responsibilities, ask yourself a simple question: Are you working towards creating something as beautiful and brilliant and evocative and uplifting as this sentence? Are you working towards a goal that people will applaud and regard with awe?

                    

Technorati Tags: Amsterdam, Book publishing, Fiction writing, Ian McEwan, Man Booker Prize, Publishing, Writing

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At 17, I read Catcher and I was moved by Holden Caulfield’s pessimistic attitude and general disillusionment with the world. Here was a fictional character that understood the fears and anxieties of growing up in a world full of contradictions and phoniness. The novel spoke to me, as no other novel had before.

A year ago, I re-read Catcher and had a much different reaction to it than I did at 17. This time around, Holden comes across as confused and mistrustful. Who could blame him? His parents had withdrawn from him emotionally after the death of Holden’s brother. They sent him away to a private school, where he felt abandoned. A teacher at a prep school makes a pass at him (or so Holden thinks), at a time when young Holden desperately needs some direction in his life. 

With the benefit of years and maturity behind me, I found myself pitying Holden, rather than identifying with him. This is a teenager who has some serious issues and needs professional help, but his method of coping (although amusing in fiction) is to remove himself from life and criticize everyone and everything that he doesn’t agree with.

Holden’s central messages in Catcher – adults aren’t to be trusted, running away from problems, avoiding contact with people – are exactly the wrong messages that young people need to hear. Young adults need encouragement, feedback and involvement. They need to engage with the world, not run away from it. 

As for Salinger, the author, he walked away from the fame game at the height of his popularity; he hasn’t published anything since 1965. The publishing world has been obsessing over his silence ever since. His reclusive lifestyle seems to have been an extension of Holden Caulfied’s; in other words, when the going gets rough, he walks away. Salinger apparently felt like a circus clown in promoting his work, and so he chose a life of self-imposed exile from the world of letters. 

In Salinger’s case, he could afford to walk away from publishing, but this decision always struck me as odd. Writers are, by their very nature, shy and withdrawn. They spend most of their time alone in a room; you’d think that publishing, going on book tours and meeting fans would be a welcome relief from the solitary nature of the writing profession. 

The work Salinger left behind is what’s important, though. The Catcher in the Rye, along with a handful of excellent short stories, will be read for generations. Salinger was a gifted writer who understood the struggles and frustrations associated with becoming an adult. 

As for that pile of unpublished manuscripts that Salinger is rumoured to have left behind, who knows if it’s true. If he did leave a few novels in a safe, and his estate allows them to be published, there’s no guarantee that they are any good. Perhaps he had nothing left to say, as Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities) suggested in an Esquire article published in the 1980s. 

In any case, the Salinger story seems far from over. But my message to young readers is that engagement with the world is better than withdrawing from it. It’s easy to become disillusioned when things aren’t going your way. It’s much harder to put your difficulties aside and press on with confidence and hope. 

Readers shouldn’t look to Salinger (or to Holen Caulfield) for life lessons. Read and enjoy Salinger’s works, but don’t pattern your life after him or his fictional alter ego.

J.D. Salinger

                    

Technorati Tags: Book publishing, Fiction for young adults, Holden Caulfield, J.D. Salinger, Publishing, The Catcher in the Rye, Writing

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On August 4, 2002, Horn set out from North Cape, Norway, in a custom sail boat and headed west towards Greenland. His solo journey around the Arctic Circle took him 27 months to complete. Conquering The Impossible is Horn’s first-person account of the many challenges and triumphs that he encountered along the way.

Throughout his trip, Horn battled severe windstorms, sub-zero temperatures (minus 98 degrees at one point), physical exhaustion, equipment failure, hypothermia, ice flows, polar bears, grizzly bears, Russian bureaucracy, complete darkness for weeks on end, and many other obstacles.

Horn’s willpower is almost unimaginable. He attacked problems with a rigorous determination and a stubborn refusal to give up. Whenever possible, he sought out the wisdom of native peoples in the north who knew the lay of the land. Every stage of his trip had to be planned with precision, to increase his odds of survival.

 His food, provisions and equipment had to be hauled by sleigh, kayak and sailboat. To train for this type of hike around the Arctic Circle, Horn did a solo trek to the North Pole, which was cut short due to frostbite.

After reading Conquering the Impossible, it makes our own mental and physical exertions seem pale in comparison. At one point, after having hiked for an entire day through a storm, Horn realized that the wind was blowing too hard to set up his tent. So he kept marching through the darkness – for 48 more hours!

Some may wonder why Horn would dedicate so much time and energy to achieve such a monumental goal, given that he is married and has two children. The risks that he faced on this trip were quite real; several times he came close to perishing on the icy tundra and under the Arctic waves. His previous adventures have been equally fraught with danger.

But Horn is different than the rest of us. He is driven to succeed on a larger scale than most of us weekend warriors who enjoy hiking and biking and paddling. He carves out huge, audacious goals and throws himself into achieving them with a supreme confidence and a total lack of inhibition.

In addition to being a modern day adventure, Conquering The Impossible also reads as a guide for setting and achieving goals. For this adventure to succeed, Horn had to prepare himself and his body with strenuous training. He had to acquire the right sponsors and ensure that he had the right clothing and equipment (some equipment had to be custom made, because nobody had ever subjected it to such extreme conditions). He had to assemble a team that he could depend on to replenish his supplies and to assist with communications and logistics, from start to finish. 

Conquering The Impossible is an inspiring story that should provoke readers to aim higher and stretch farther than they are accustomed to. Many self-help books promise to change or improve our lives; few actually do. This book will entirely change your mind about what is possible with the right attitude and a single-minded determination.

                    

Technorati Tags: Achievement, Arctic adventure, conquering the impossible, Mike Horn, North Pole, Planning for success, Self promotion

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The free business model is one that newspaper publishers have been forced to adopt, as their news organizations have moved online. With advertising revenues and readerships in decline, publishers have been trying to devise revenue models to ensure the long-term viability and success of their businesses. 

On January 20, the New York Times took a bold step to address this issue by announcing that it plans to start charging for content on its website, beginning in 2011. Some articles will still be free, but at a certain point, readers will have to pay if they want to access to more articles. The Times is the first non-financial newspaper group to move in this direction. 

Here’s an excerpt from the NYT Press Release:

The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number. This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business. It will also provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.

Through 2010, NYTimes.com will be building a new online infrastructure designed to provide consumers with a frictionless experience across multiple platforms. Once the metered model is implemented, New York Times home delivery print subscribers will continue to have free access to NYTimes.com.

“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’ extraordinary, professional journalism,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

“This process of rethinking our business model has also been driven by our desire to achieve additional revenue diversity that will make us less susceptible to the inevitable economic cycles,” said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO, The New York Times Company. “We were also guided by the fact that our news and information are being featured in an increasingly broad range of end-user devices and services, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision.”

The New York Times introduced a paid service a few years ago, where readers could access premium articles by columnists Thomas Friedman, Marueen Dowd, Paul Krugman and others. The company discontinued that model because, it said, search engine optimization had changed and that more revenue could be generated without charging for content. 

In theory, charging for online content makes a lot of sense, and it’s something newspapers should have been doing all along. Unfortunately, that genie has already left the bottle. If you’ve been giving away valued content for free, how do you now turn around and ask readers to start paying for it? 

Unless newspapers en masse decide to start charging for their content, how will the Times model survive? Readers have thousands of alternative web sites in which to get their news for free.

It will be interesting to see how many other news groups (or newspapers) follow the New York Times with a paid model.

                    

Technorati Tags: Business model, Internet content, Internet marketing, Journalism, Media pioneers, New York Times, Paid online content, Publishing, Search engine optimization, Thomas Friedman

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Why are children in TV commercials almost always cast as precocious or whiny? Why can’t they ever be themselves? Well, the ad agency that produced a series of TV commercials for Ally Bank (BBH New York) must have asked themselves that same question.

These ads for Ally Bank demonstrate that it’s okay to cast children in TV commercials if you let kids be kids. Don’t give them dialogue that doesn’t fit their age. Don’t make them out to be smarter or wiser than they are.

In one of the Ally Bank ads, a young boy is playing with a red truck. A sharp-dressed man takes the truck away and gives the kid a paper cut-out truck as a replacement. He claims that the red truck comes with a “limited time offer,” and the kid’s time is up. The look of confusion on the kid’s face is priceless. He’s not acting; his expression seems completely natural and unrehearsed, and that’s why this commercial works. This kid reacts as any kid his age would react when he feels he’s been cheated.

Another ad shows two young girls sitting at a table. The man asks one of the girls if she wants a pony. She nods expectantly, and the man gives her a plastic pony. When the second girl says that she wants a pony, too, the man whistles and out comes an actual pony. The camera zooms on the first girl’s face to register her disbelief. She’s confused and angry over the unfairness of it all.

These commercials are funny, subtle, effective and memorable. The message – banks not being upfront with their clients – comes through loud and clear.

The tag line for these Ally Bank commercials is: Even kids know it’s wrong to hide behind fine print. Why don’t banks?

We need more ads that let kids be kids.

                    

Technorati Tags: Ally Bank, Children in commercials, Chrysler, Corporate image, Marketing & branding, TV advertising, TV commerials

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