What Radio Can Learn From Apple's Meltdown

It is said in Proverbs 29, "Where there is no vision, the people will perish!" Can it be any different for a company? I have been reading about Apple's meltdown in the stock market, but nobody is talking about the meltdown in vision. Someone is always looking for a culprit in a car wreck and I have heard every excuse from a sagging economy in China to longer iPhone replacement cycles due to higher prices, but nobody is talking about Apple CEO Tim Cook and his utter lack of vision. When he was appointed CEO, Tim Cook may have been the sharpest knife in Apple's drawer, but Steve Jobs was the brightest star in the universe. He is the reason Apple became the richest company in the world. The Macbook, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch, App store, Cloud services, etc., are all revenue streams and sugar plums that danced in the head of Steve Jobs for the last 35 years.

In football parlance, quarterback Tim Cook is a "game manager" at best. Quarterback Steve Jobs was Tom Brady. He knew just what to do inside the red zone because the homework was done on a blackboard and the practice field. We always knew when Steve Jobs sauntered on stage, clad in jeans and a black turtleneck, that the device he held in his hands would be the next big thing. Tim Cook has the dress code down at Apple summits now, but not much else. Tell me what ground-breaking device he walked on stage to talk about since he assumed command? Has your life been changed by Tim Cook? How did Amazon and others, brazenly steal the smartspeaker space when Steve Jobs gave the world Siri? How did Amazon amazingly capture and brand the space while Apple slept? The market vertical that could have been called "Siri" is now called "Alexa!" Smartspeaker growth is exploding like the iPhone once did and I guarantee you that had Jobs been alive, he'd have branded this space with another winner for Apple's stellar lineup.

What does the richest company in the world do to improve its bottom line with its cash reserves? It should be creating products through trial and error to constantly feed the ecosystem known as Apple, but those ideas can only be created by a visionary. When you're a game manager and simply don't have the headlights for the "next big thing." You might try to increase share price by employing a stock buyback plan. It takes no vision, no innovation ... just someone who thinks they know how to time the market. That is exactly what Tim Cook did. Apple, like a lot of companies, was a welcome recipient of the recent corporate tax overhaul. So when the market started to tank last fall, Tim engineered an Apple stock buyback plan to the tune of $69 billion. He'd show shareholders the other ways for a game manager to skin a cat! When the market turned into quicksand, Apple lost $9 billion on the trade! How many new products could have been tested and deployed with $9 billion? When did Apple replace vision with day trading? Can you imagine Steve Jobs trying to be CNBC's Jim Cramer?

The core of great leadership starts with a vision for the road ahead. Henry Ford II, Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch ... all grew their company fortunes in good times and bad with 20/20 vision. In my opinion, the summit of the Apple mountain was reached last October when the share price peaked around $233. Since then Apple has lost $446 billion in market capitol! That's twice the cap of Wells Fargo. It's three times the size of McDonalds'. You can't make up this kind of deficit up with an exuberant stock market. You can only make up lost ground with explosive products that literally change people's lives or find and acquire the companies that are doing just that. Unless Apple starts to find the brightest stars in the universe, it is all downhill from here, because innovation never dies, but companies with flawed vision,do.

Radio can take a very important lesson from this glaring lack of foresight as it has stayed behind the curve digitally for the last 20 years while advertisers looked for and found cheaper and more targeted alternatives. It wasn't all that long ago that the battle cry at any convention from broadcast VPs was, 'Get a Website,' with eye rolls from every vendor in the hallway. However, the industry has been given new life by forward thinking executives who now know that 20% of their revenue must come from anything but a traditional rate card. They know that their weekly listening cume will interact with them digitally if the content is compelling -- and that is where the vision comes in: knowing the market likes and dislikes and engaging the listener interactively.

The smartspeaker is bringing a whole new world of listening to terrestrial radio with people who only listened in the car; now the medium is finally connecting the dots to the cellphone. The car, the cellphone, and the home gives radio a magical edge not enjoyed in years. Radio was arguably the "Siri" of its time nearly a hundred years ago and after some questionable "game management" through consolidation, it is now differentiating itself from its competitors in truly unique ways.

Leaders lead, followers fail ... and the beat goes on!