People end up being where they are more by accident than design. A lot of the people who are the living success stories around us will tell us how they just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
This is very often the rule, not the exception. It’s especially so for the pioneers. In my own field of interest, broadcasting, the great broadcasters normally fell into their jobs by asking if they could have a go. They came with a ready made talent and knowledge inbuilt, but no formal training whatsoever.
Take the greats in radio and television like Kenny Everett, or, from the more serious side, people like Richard Dimbleby or Robin Day.
Kenny Everett is the more contemporary of course.
Nobody taught Kenny Everett how to be creative, he worked it out. He worked out how to edit and multi-track and to ‘produce’ audio bites to include between the records he was playing on the radio. This later transferred to television beautifully.
Importantly, he was a pioneer and hadn’t previously completed some random ‘Media Degree’ course. He hadn’t spent time being told how to think, how to be.
Yes, he was given guidance, but he was given his first job on the radio because working on the radio (as a disc-jockey) was a new idea and he was keen to give it a go.
The same could be said about most of the pop radio pioneers, and a self-created style and approach to radio was what they brought, unclouded by the need for all that college and university training to do it.
Stepping further back, and looking at the career of Richard Dimbleby, we have a man who tried out radio commentary and descriptions of news events for the very first time, and took on the various tasks associated with pioneering speech and news broadcasting across the country.
Again he had no previous training or ‘qualifications’ to enable him to do this. It had not been done before. So, he was in the right place at the right time, had the idea and then was able to run with it.
In the world of business, so many huge businesses were initially created by those without formal training or qualifications, just having a go and being in the right place at the right time. Yet to get to work for those businesses today, there will be minimum qualifications and previous experience required. Qualifications and experience that the original pioneers never had.
Why the disparity?
It seems to me that across society we are shutting people out. We are not allowing them into areas that were initially the domain of those who had never been there before.
In the case of the radio personality, is it really true that the only people we will employ today are those with Media Degrees?
The problem seems to be that whilst the pioneers were free spirits, looking at a new way of doing something and then doing it, those that follow are forced to be homogenised and grown in sausage factories. They have to pass ability tests, show knowledge of what went before, and, most importantly, they have to conform. They mustn’t stand out or create or innovate or push boundaries or look for new ways to move forward.
Why have we allowed it to get to this?
For my own part, trying to employ people, I look for people who are natural. I have no real interest in what they’ve done before, their training and qualifications, or their awareness of what went before.
I look for people who are just about able to fit in without being badly disruptive, who see lots of ways forward, who at times are annoying and yet deservedly smug, yet will help me and my business for a least a little while. When they leave or move on I want to have known they were there. Erm, in a good way.
The problem with homogenising people and demanding they be fully trained, fully qualified, and fully robotic is that things stagnate. They badly stagnate. They are fully glued into the past and have no ideas for the future.
Unfortunately, today’s stagnation in creative broadcasting is directly because of this. That’s why the majority of the telly sucks, and the radio sends you to sleep. It never used to, and now we understand why.
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