Total Rethink

19Ten-Year-Olds Have Great Ideas, Too

“Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking.”

—Steve Jobs

The idea of a “total rethink” can work with the finding of solutions for small problems as well as big ones. In 1998 we still owned C-TEC Cable and each franchise had to have, by law, a local studio, but nobody ever used them because, in the days before the cable companies grew big and rich, they were mostly creepy little rooms located in the back of cable companies' offices. Each cable channel had to have one community channel that was local to that town in order to get a franchise and be granted permission to dig up the streets and lay the cables. These local studios were costing us around $1 million per year, and I wanted to find a way to rationalize them down and at the same time make the studio experience more congenial for those who ended up interviewing or being interviewed in them.

The way it was structured wasn't logical. It would have been simple for people to travel from surrounding towns to one central location in order to be interviewed or perform or talk, but I was told it was a legal requirement to provide studio facilities in each town. Then it occurred to me that instead of trying to coax people to the studios, which were depressing, sterile places, we should find a way to take the studios to the people and to the places where the stories were actually happening, by creating an outside broadcast facility that would comply ...