LUNCH WITH KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Sailing Into The Storm - Mapping Our Course to a Safe Port

Published: Oct. 3, 2006, 5:30 p.m.

Once upon a time millions came together in families, and as an audience, at a common time to share the insight and the wonder of the stories that we could deliver into their homes. They repaid us with their attention and with their support. Now the digital age has broken the connection to time and place. It has opened up the possibility of endless choice and for many platforms known and yet to be discovered. It has broken the whole idea of an audience, or a communal sharing, into millions of individuals who want things their way. It has broken the centrality of 3,000 years of media where one spoke to many. We are sailing into a storm. So what we do now? How do we hold our audience? How do we fulfill our mission as public broadcasters? How do we pay our bills when the underpinnings of everything we could rely on are eroding? What do we have to offer that will recommit our audience to us? I will do my best to answer these frightening questions. I cannot give you the specifics but I will do my best to provide you with a map and a course. To find the map and the course, we have to go high up above the chaos of the hurricane of the digital revolution to where we can see the pattern of the storm. When we can see the pattern, I hope that we can then make sense of our predicament. To see what is really going on, we have to first go back a long way and we have to go high. Then we will come back to sea level. So, I will first take us back in time to understand why the digital era has ironically launched a great return to the most traditional and the most human way of communicating. My purpose is to show you a model based, not on a consultant's dream, but on the observation of how humans are designed by nature to interact and communicate with each other. Then I will take us into the present where we will see how some new organizations are using these ancient and human of principles to build exceptionally successful enterprises that are shattering the traditional alternatives. Finally I will get us back to sea level where I will suggest both a safe port and a course for a successful voyage.