When I’m working, a lot of my reading is focused on what’s going on in the world of work. On vacation, probably like most of you, I read something different. Last week, I read about Pacific Northwest history and a book about trees. I also read this great article about the 40th anniversary of “Reading Rainbow.”
Like most PBS shows, it never had a huge budget over its 155-show run. They pitched the idea and got a green light for a pilot. They shot the pilot with LeVar Burton and then got the green light for a season.
They scrapped their way to becoming one of the longest-running children’s shows in the history of public television. There was no fixed set. They needed to get rights to the books for their episodes. There was no narrative arc to follow. They needed to actually get onto local stations that controlled their own programming.
The secret to the show's success, despite the lack of resources, was its incredible focus. It was simply just a show about kids learning to love reading. As someone who grew up watching it, it stoked a love of reading, writing, and storytelling in a way that its simple presentation actually accelerated.
It didn’t need fantastical presentations or big budgets. It just needed to be on TV to a generation of kids who consumed it. If it is weird that a TV show can be credited with encouraging reading, its simple presentation also helped.
It reminded me of havin been in HR and being concerned about all of the constraints put on our work, especially resource constraints. It felt daunting and impossible to deliver our mission.
As we struggled to deliver fantastical experiences on a shoestring, we should’ve instead focused our efforts more how to better deliver a simple but ambitious experience. Our constraints should have guided us to say no to things outside of our core mission, so we could invest in the things that were truly important.
This doesn’t mean we should always expect to be underfunded or that we should expect to move mountains with a limited budget. In fact, focusing your ambitions and goals instead of keeping them broad despite a lack of funding is the best way to deliver on expectations and argue for more budget.
The “Reading Rainbow” lesson isn’t that it was the best children’s show on television. It was the best show about reading at a time when competitors were trying to squeeze in reading between nine other show segments. The focus of “Reading Rainbow” made it great, and the constraints it lived with kept the program focused on delivering on its mission for a decade.