A series of pretty long flights and flight delays the last few months not only provided some decent blog material for my 'Notes From the Road' series, but also furnished the opportunity to finally read the almost 800-page unofficial oral history of ESPN called 'Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN', by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. 
The book's format, and it is definitely not for everyone, has almost no author penned narrative or exposition. Rather the story of ESPN unfolds in a long series of snippets from interviews that the authors conducted with more than 500 people that built, led, worked at, or observed ESPN since its humble beginnings in 1979 to its self-proclaimed position today as the 'Worldwide Leader in Sports.' The tale of ESPN, with plenty of drama, corporate infighting, scandal, really questionable to downright bad behavior, innovative and groundbreaking ideas, and finally to its position today as probably the most powerful single entity in sports, (and the main reason your cable TV bill is so high), is really targeted at the sports junkies among us. So while I enjoyed the book, I can't really recommend it to anyone other than the sports-obsessed.
But in the 800 pages worth of observations and comments from (mostly), really successful and accomplished executives, broadcasters, and marketers there are quite a number of interesting and kind of instructive pieces of advice that have application in areas beyond sports the presentation of sports on TV. Again, while there are several of these in the book - I will just highlight one, an examination and recommendation on staying fresh, even when the work seems repetitive, and how to continue to bring new ideas to the table when it can be easy to keep trotting out the 'this is the way we've always done it' card.
Here it is, some advice from ESPN Executive Producer Bill Fitts to the line Producers as to what they should do with their written post-mortem show reports after an event had been broadcasted:
"When you guys finish your shows, take that file and throw it out. Do not keep one piece of paper, because next year when we have to come back and do this again, it will force you to rethink everything you did, not just pick up from where you left off and implement the same procedures and production elements that you did last year."
Money. The challenge in a creative field like broadcasting is to continue to push, to keep new ideas flowing, to devise and deliver new ways for the audience to experience the events so that with each viewing, even if if was the 3,459rd basketball game they had seen, maybe something about the show would be new, fresh, innovative. And you can really only make that happen, at least consistently, by letting go of the past, your assumptions, your pre-conceived constraints, and look at the challenge like it was brand new, and anything is possible.
And its good advice for us in the workplace as well. Whether it is annual benefits open enrollment, a new training and development program we are pushing, or a new system we are building - how might the way we deliver be different, (and hopefully better), if we could really let go of the past and start brand new.