This is by one of Canada's real unsung heroes, Parker Barss Donham who writes and thinks clearly, creatively and with a strong moral sense from somewhere in the wilds of Cape Breton Island. M ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 08:40:05 -0400 From: Parker Barss Donham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PARKER:1749] Column: 3-10-99 CRTC brief 10 March 1999 Readers of Parker's column list: My column this week, which you can retrieve until Sunday, March 14, at <http://www.hfxnews.southam.ca/Perspective/Donham.html> was a boiled down version of a brief I delivered Tuesday to the CRTC hearings in Sydney on the CBC's license renewal. Rather than sending the column, as I usually do, I and sending the full brief. If I ran the CBC A presentation to the CRTC 9 March 1999 Sydney, Nova Scotia By Parker Barss Donham I want to declare at the outset that I make a slice of my income from current affairs freelance work for the CBC -- and mostly regional programs at that. So I have a personal stake in many of the issues before the commission, and I probably won't be one of the big advocates of killing off supper hour news shows. For just over a year in the late 1970s, the CBC employed me to produce its Information Morning program in Sydney. It was one of the most unpleasant workplaces I ever experienced. Managers with too little to do and too much time to do it in constantly squared off against a small cadre of underworked staffers who used their union affiliations as a shield against production responsibilities. This infused the simplest tasks with potential for personal conflict. A web of unspoken rules throttled productivity. At coffee and meal breaks, work ground to a halt and the staff lunch room overflowed. All this happened despite a great majority of capable, energetic broadcasters, women and men of good will who only wanted to produce first rate programs. Then something remarkable occurred. A few years ago, in one of the seemingly perpetual rounds of CBC cuts, the last management positions in Sydney disappeared. Around the same time, CBC bought off Sydney's most truculent unionists with pensions. Today there is not a single manager in the building. They had to fly one in to run essential equipment during the strike. Yet the place runs like a top. You don't find malcontents skulking about the lunch room; Staffers are at their desk or out in the field doing their jobs. The results are equally remarkable. CBC Sydney produces an exceptionally good Information Morning program -- far better than when I produced it with half again as many bodies. Its coverage of local issues is more detailed and thoughtful than that of the daily papers available locally. Listeners have rewarded this performance. As private radio stations abandoned their community ties and homogenized into a bland sameness, Information Morning's ratings soared. I believe there is a lesson for the CBC in this experience -- and in the experience of another Cape Breton industry that has undergone wrenching change. I'm here with the novel suggestion that CBC should look to a railway for inspiration. A better way to run a railway In the fall of 1993, Canadian National sold the Sydney-to-Truro section of its main line to RailTex, the US company that buys money-losing branch lines from mainline railways and turns them into profit centres. The formula works like this: Each RailTex line operates as a separate business under a local manager given broad authority. A RailTex line typically employs half as many workers as its mainline predecessors, and those workers must master a variety of trades. Instead of the traditional three-man crew consisting of engineer, brake man, and conductor, a RailTex train operates with two "transportation specialists." On an outbound run, one Transpec might drive the train while the other performs outdoor duties. Homeward bound, they switch. If the run takes less than eight hours, they might finish the shift doing an oil change or even cutting brush along the track. The company issues business cards to each of its employees, and encourages everyone to keep an eye cocked for shipping prospects. "If you notice a truck down at the other end of the loading dock," they're told, "Find out what it's carrying, where it's going. Our sales people may not be able to get that information going in the front door." Instead of waiting for higher-ups to make decisions in the command-and-control style of CN, employees are freed to solve problems themselves, as they arise. I rode a RailTex train once from Sydney to the switching station at Havre Boucher, and the two transpecs, Everett Sullivan and Howie Clough, told me about the first time they ran into trouble after RailTex took over. They were carrying a heavy load of steel, newsprint, and 30 cars of coal for NSP's Trenton power plant. It was snowing, and at Marshy Hope, the engines' driving wheels began to slip. The quickest solution would have been to drop the coal off the end of the train, complete the run to Truro with the steel and paper, then return later for the coal. But left outside overnight, the coal might freeze, making it infinitely harder for NSP to use. So they took the extra time to drop the coal, back the steel and paper onto a siding, then reconnect with the coal cars and take them to New Glasgow, where a shunter engine would delivery it to Trenton the same night. After they had done this, the cell phone rang in the cab. "How are you getting along in the snow," assistant manager Peter McCarron wanted to know. Sullivan explained what they had done. "Whose idea was that?" McCarron demanded gruffly. Sullivan glanced at Clough. "We talked it over, and it seemed like the best thing to do." "We'll you're right," said the manager. "I appreciate your taking the time to do it right. It'll make things a lot easier for Nova Scotia Power." After telling me this story, Sullivan said, "You know, if that had happened under CN, we would have had to park the train and call Moncton to ask someone what to do. The guy in Moncton would have told us to hang on while he went down the hall to ask his boss. His boss would have called Montreal who didn't even know where Trenton was. And at the end of it, they would have either told us to do the wrong thing, or the thing we would have done if it had been left up to us in the first place." Clough and Sullivan transpecs make lower wages than when they were unionized CN employees. But a few days after the close of each fiscal quarter, a percentage of the line's pretax profits is distributed to each employee according to a locally determined formula. The profit sharing makes up for some but not all of the wage gap. The result? Well, customers love it. There are a hundred stories about little extra acts of consideration for customers since RailTex took over the Truro-Sydney line. Shippers get much better service, so they start sending more by rail. Improved sales coupled with lower costs produce profits, so the shareholders are happy. Perhaps most important, the workers I've spoken with report a more satisfying work life, mainly because they have more control over their work. The most remarkable thing about this change is that when RailTex took over the Sydney line, all but a handful of the 47 workers it hired were former unionized employees of CN. And as its assistant manager, it hired McCarron, a former CN exec, who has since become overall manager. "How can they do it," a CN vice-president demanded when he heard of the soaring customer satisfaction. "How can they do a better job than we ever did, using our own manager and our own workers -- and only half as many of them?" A better way to run a network So I'm here before the CRTC today to propose a restructuring of the CBC far more radical than the familiar recipe one hears out of Toronto. You know the witless mantra that urges destruction of regional programming and moving everything to -- surprise! -- Toronto. What if the CBC were reorganized into a multitude of completely autonomous units in which creative local programmers enjoyed a free hand to develop their markets as they saw fit, with a minimum of bureaucratic oversight. Instead of a national template imposed on, say, every drive-home radio show in Canada, St. John's might produce an afternoon show very different from Winnipeg's. And why not? Winnipeg and St. John's are very different places -- though you might not know it from listening to the CBC, and you certainly wouldn't know it from listening to private radio. Autonomous programming units might be geographically based -- Sydney Radio, Victoria Radio -- or defined by a particular program -- As It Happens, Vinyl Cafe -- but they would enjoy a new level of editorial and creative independence, a mandate to innovate and to connect with their markets. Give creative, talented Canadian broadcasters this leeway, and let a thousand flowers bloom. Multitasking In such an environment, multitasking would be essential -- not primarily to give managers more flexibility, which is how the CBC has always tried to sell it -- but to give each member of the production team an understanding of what every other person does, and how the parts fit together. "When people spend all their time in one function, they see every issue from a single perspective," writes Jack Stack in The Great Game of Business (Currency-Doubleday, New York, 1992). "They can't appreciate other departments' needs. Walls go up. Communication is terrible." I'd like to see every CBC employee spend one or two days a month doing jobs they are completely unused to. Let two staff members with sharply different roles trade jobs. Let them see their program from different perspectives than their own. Open-book management Making a radically decentralized CBC work well will also require a level of openness and communication that runs contrary to deeply entrenched CBC culture. Here, the CBC could usefully borrow from a movement among progressive US businesses known as open-book management. Let's say a supper hour news show has $2.8 million to spend in a fiscal year. Every person on the unit should know that fact, and representatives from every craft in the team should have a role in deciding how to allocate that budget in a transparent, zero-based process that would occur annually. Once a budget is established, copies should be distributed to every member of the production team. At least once a month, a clear, understandable statement of expenditures in the previous month, and year-to-date, should be distributed to every member of the team. This is not the CBC way. (Nor, in fairness, is it the way most companies operate.) The usual approach to budgets to let front-line workers know as little as possible, a practice that breeds suspicion, jealousy, and inefficiency. When money is short, which it is, every dollar must be directed to achieving programming goals. Every member of the team must understand her role in that process. A manager who keeps secrets from the staff can't achieve that. Open-book management will also reassure staff that more than enough work exists to fill the day of everyone on the unit. That, in turn, may lessen resistance to (and even enlist the team's help in) finding low cost ways to put compelling reports on air. If a team sees $1,000 in meal displacements show up month after month, they may start agitating for better ways to spend that money on production. The trickiest aspect of the scheme I propose would be to develop benchmarks for accountability. Where a rail line can use profit as a ready yardstick of performance, CBC production units would need subtler measures. Ratings, television ad sales, audience surveys, peer review, and contributions to national programs could all be part of the mix. * * * Obviously, much of this presentation falls under the purview of CBC management, not CRTC oversight. So how does it relate to the issues you have asked us to consider? Here are brief replies to the questions posed by the commission. Q: How well does the CBC fulfil its role as the national public broadcaster? A: It is faltering creatively, and the radical structure I propose could foster innovation. Q: In the new millennium, should the CBC fulfil its role in a different manner than it has in the past? A: Of course, because new technologies are altering the medium at breakneck speed. Q: How well does the CBC serve the public on a regional as well as at a national level? A: A false dichotomy. Is Alice Munro a regional writer because her voice arises from small town Ontario? Of course not. She is a Canadian writer of national stature. You cannot serve the nation without serving the regions. Unfortunately, what many people mean when they say serving the nation is serving the most buoyant economic centres of the nation, chiefly Toronto. Toronto will never have trouble communicating its view of itself and the country to the rest of Canada. But in a country so richly diverse as ours, a national broadcaster must be rooted in the regions. You do that with regional programming. It is the way you connect with the sources of Canadian stories, and how you develop a talent for national programming. The radically decentralized structure I propose would work with that reality, not against it. Q: Should the programming provided by CBC radio and television be different from that provided by other broadcasters? If so, what should these differences be? A: The much-discussed fragmentation of the broadcast marketplace tends to be advertiser driven and tends to occur along lines of demographics and subject matter, not geography. Far from serving local markets well, as advocates of a centralized CBC contend private broadcasters do, the privates are withdrawing from local coverage. This is most pervasive in radio, but has affected TV as well. Newspapers, too, are becoming more formulaic and homogeneous as chain ownership spreads. The CBC may be the only journalistic institution left with the will and the capacity to do thoughtful, detailed coverage of local stories. Q: Is there a special role that the CBC should play in the presentation of Canadian programming? If so, what should this role be? A: To reflect Canada to itself, and its parts to each other. Thank you. (Attached to the brief was is an article by the witness from the November, 1995, issue of Reader's Digest, about the RailTex takeover of the Truro-Sydney line.) <I> Copyright (c) 1999 by Parker Barss Donham. All rights reserved. ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- ------------------------------------------------ Parker Barss Donham | 902-674-2953 (vox) 8190 Kempt Head Road | 902-674-2994 (fax) Bras d'Or, NS B0C-1B0 | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- All the list info you'll ever want: http://antler.moose.to/~server/parker
