I’m the co-founder and product of a successful podcast media company with ten years of podcast publishing, seven figure revenues, and solid position in the Top 200 for our category on Apple Podcasts.  You can imagine that we get endless stream of “earned media” requests from companies and agencies wanting to get free coverage for the people who hired them. 

The moral angle of getting paid to ask for free stuff is problematic. Paying people to ask for free stuff is a worse moral position in my view. Most often the sort of people who do either of these things do not have any care or concern about you and your business. Its' all about them and what they can get from you. 

Definition “Earned media is free publicity by third parties. It’s achieved through PR outreach rather than paid advertising”

Audience 

One last thing before we get into it. The most important thing in podcasting is your audience. Anything that gives your audience a reason to press next your show means you have failed. 

Finding a win/win situation in podcasting is extremely rare. Your audience, brand and work deserve to get something. Don’t give away free coverage. 

Unsolicited Guests Are Bad Guests

• Guests pitched by marketing / PR firms are most often (~90%) awful guests. Thats why they need a PR firm to pitch them. 
• People who get free coverage rarely prepare content or take the time to understand your content strategy. It’s —free— so it’s not important to them.
• These people most often fail to prepare their audio setup or even think about it. At all. 
• Unsolicited guests have an agenda and will talk about stuff that your audience probably doesn’t care about. 
• Beware the ‘ego guest’ who hired marketing/PR firm to place them on podcasts so they can boost their resume / profile

Some Practical Tips for Working With Placed Guests 

• Your brand has value, your podcast is valuable, people want to leverage your work and get that value for themselves. Understand this. 
• You can and should demand some sort of return - what promotion will they do, where will the podcast be promoted, will they run paid promotion campaigns on Facebook/LinkedIn ? What is the social media profile of your guest ? Can you gain advantage from the guest ? If the answer nothing, why are you even bothering. 
• If the PR pitch doesn’t mention what amplification they bring then you are getting nothing. 
• You can tell a free guest that they are not good enough to publish. 
• If a ‘free guest’ doesn’t prepare then cancel the recording and walk away. Don’t waste more of your time. 
• Screen the ‘free guest’ with a prep call. If the person is an assclown, cancel the recording. 
• Expect to delete some/most of these recordings. Its better to not publish than to publish bad content and lose audience. 
• Don’t ever take unsolicited guests. Find your own, its actually less work than this. 

Business Thoughts

• Non-profit companies - there are ‘non-profits’ that have large revenues that operate like companies e.g non-profit, membership associations. If they can employ marketing people who ask for free coverage instead paying for it, they have money to pay for sponsoring your podcast 
• Any  revenue generating organisation should expect to sponsor/pay for a podcast because you like getting paid too. They should respect your time and commitment. 

Earned Media is Over

The idea of earned media is dead. Back in the days of magazines and news, journalists were independent of business of sponsorship/advertising and an ecosystem of people worked to influence the content creators to get “free coverage”. 

Today the content creators are the business and perform their own sponsorship/advertising. Without revenue, creators cannot survive and lose audience. PR agencies and marketing people continue to pitch vendors products that will deliver “earned media” and I’m sure its a tempting sell. The thing is, “earned media” almost never has the money to have a big audience. 

I guess this might make the process look complicated but its mostly common sense and investing some time in your tools.

Personally I view good audio/video as the modern equivalent of a quality suit/tie/leather shoes for attending important meetings (but it costs less than that).

I currently use and moderately recommend the RØDE Microphones NT-USB model - http://rode.com/microphones/nt-usb

I chose this microphone because its low cost (about USD$150) and USB connected. This makes it easy to use and integrates with apps better. For example, Zoom shows a USB microphone by its name (using audio interfaces is more confusing). 

Also I’ve been happily using Rode microphones for ten years plus our audio professionals highly recommend them.

However, the microphone itself isn’t the success factor. It took me a number of years to use a microphone correctly so I’ll offer some brief tips:

• You must have your mouth close to the microphone when speaking. By close mean within 6 inches or less. This requires self training for most people.
• You need a boom mount to do that - Link: RØDE Microphones - PSA1 - http://rode.com/accessories/psa1 is a good choice but a cheap knockoff from eBay or Amazon will work ok for normal use.
• Know what the microphone orientation is - they are directional. The Rode NT-USB has a definite front/back thing going on.
• My office has treatment with damping materials which reduces reflected sound. You can’t see them in the camera shot. Most places could use at least some damping (but sometimes you don’t).
• Take some time to understand levels on a microphone and what is the right setting for your voice.

I've looked into 'Audry for Podcasters' which, from my view, is an lame attempt to aggregate a bunch of low value podcasts whose operators that are incompetent at making their own connections and business.

Why ? So you can to exploit them by spaffing low quality, high volume ads onto their shows while arbitraging the sell/buy rate. Those ads would be placed using programmatic methods ( they claim to have a AI ad spots placement ) so ….. hello Google Adwords spam.

Reminder that professional blogging died when Google decided to increase it's share of the advertising take. Google found it cheaper and better to deal with a handful of large sites instead of millions of small sites.

I mean even Blubrry stopped bothering with this business model because it doesn't work.

Nothing new or innovative here. Simply copying a proven competitor - aka Google. This project is an attempting blitz scale Aubry sales growth by spending money to generate demand for their core business.

Podcasters should be hyper-connected inside their market. Having Audry do that is negative value because, as a podcast owner/operator, those relationships are core business value. If you don't know that that then your podcast will fail soon enough (unless its a passion project).

The principle of cross-promotion of podcasts is a proven losing strategy. You are sending your customers to a competitor. This isn't a job market or personal networking 101, its a competition find, capture and keeps ears.

So 'Audry for Podcasters' is collecting a bunch of not-yet-failed podcasts into a collective pile of failure that might give them some growth. This might give Aubry a chance to attract some of the dumber marketing people (of which there are many) to generate some revenue so they can survive to the next funding round.

Whats worse, podcast owners are wasting their time, preventing their own success and creating false hope by participating. In the last decade, I've seen at least a half a dozen startups do something like this (and disappear). I wasted so much time on those failed efforts.

What Do I Want ?

The things podcast owners should be searching for ?

1) better RSS feed managers. Google's Feedburner is trash, Feed.press is what I pay for but its become unreliable.
2) audio ad injection for your own sales inventory. don't use a third party for ad sales because they get 90% of money and you get pennies.
3) better analytics platform. Desperate for podcasting analytics that doesn't suck.

If you have those solutions, then I would be interested. Contact me

These are delightful piece of British culture if you are into Zoom backgrounds.

Give your video calls a makeover, with this selection of over 100 empty sets from the BBC Archive.

Empty sets - BBC Archive : https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/empty_sets_collection/zfvy382

Couple of things. 

I started using Instagram as space to share personal photos of what I am doing. When I started, the app was fun, delightful even and I kind of sharing images and photos of a personal nature but not on twitter. 

The last few months my dissatisfaction has been growing. I found the story function to be really intrusive, the number of ads has been increasing and become intrusive. My use of Instagram has been declining for a couple of months because its an unpleasant thing. 

Following latest information when UK government published emails seized from a company suing Facebook I was reminded that how much corporate surveillance is happening. And how Facebook execs are depending on Instagram to replace the revenue lost on the facebook site with increased advertising on instagram. 

I don't need that hassle. I've got twitter and this blog. Its all I need. 

 I don't need Instagram enough to put up with it. 

Loved this article about coffee in the 17th century being blamed for male impotence (but most likely because coffee houses were fronts for brothels)

The ‘Maiden’s Complaint’ claims the “Devil first invented this liquor, on purpose to plague our Sex”, while the Ale-Wives call coffee an “insipid, filthy, nauseous, rot gut liquor” that leaves men with neither “honey nor money”. The petitions are more than frothy spoofs mocking winkies on the blink. They are attempts to smear the revolutionary coffeehouse culture as effeminate and unmanly.

Why 17th century women thought coffee was subversive, dangerous - and made men impotent - inews.co.uk

The Rainmaker Platform is failing and they are doing nothing about it. I do not recommend My New Rainmaker. I’m trapped and I can’t get out. Here is my negative review.

I’ve been a customer of the Studiopress group for many years now. I was fortunate to purchase a Genesis Theme subscription way back in 2009 and my blog has flourished over that time. About 3 years ago the Packet Pushers business needed to grow further and we committed to migrating from a self-hosted blog into the Rainmaker Platform. I’m sad to say that this has been poor decision that has negatively impacted our business.

In short, the Rainmaker project is a failure. Recently, the business pivoted to professional services business offering consulting and design services.

Based on our experiences, do not do this. The infrastructure is failure. Let me explain.

Lack of Features

Big promises were made about new features, functions and products. Many exciting changes and developments were coming in the months ahead they told us.

The membership system is basic (at beast) and barely functional, the podcast engine is mediocre and the attempt to reskin the Wordpress interface is, I have to say, just terrible. Look at this mess:

The UX of navigating a Rainmaker site is disastrous. What does all that rubbish on the left mean ? Where is the Wordpress menus ?

The basic feature of email list integration took over 2 years to arrive and partnered with Feedblitz who is possibly the worst email provider available. Our personal experience with Feedblitz RSS has been worse than awful and there is no way I can trust their email platform. To make it worse, the integration with MailChimp is poor at best. They couldn’t have done any less.

Constant Errors

We are seeing almost constant errors and failures in delivering the most basic content. This is a total loss of all site traffic on Sunday:

Simple problems recur daily. This gif shows how slow the admin interface loads:

We reset your services, flushed the caches and your site is back online. Customer Success Specialist

This happens regardless of clearing caches, logging support requests and asking for escalation. This morning I woke up to messages from Google with large number of 5xx server failures.

I raised an site outage support request on Monday morning. 48 hours later the only response is :

This ticket has been escalated to me for review and I will be digging into this and follow up with a more detailed response at my earliest opportunity. - Cody, Director of Support

And thats the fourth time I’ve received that note in the last 3 weeks. So far “Cody” has done nothing. 

SSL Failure

Switching the site to SSL caused massive failures to our podcast feeds. The SSL certificate wasn’t signed by a recognised certificate provider and thus caused podcatchers to fail. This was followed by further operational problems when we asked to roll back the change. The roll back worked but two days later the SSL was reinstated and then hidden in a very difficult to find. It took two weeks to sort out this mess. We lost hundreds of thousands of downloads and thousands of subscribers.

The failure of SSL is partly a podcast problem but the lack of assistance from Rainmaker combined with operational failure and the poor interface.

Increased Spam

There was a time when we received just a few spam comments per month. Today I’m received multiples per day. Another sign of platform neglect.

Leaving

Yes, its probably time to leave but there is a problem. The Rainmaker platform is extensively customised / hacked up version of Wordpress,  moving will be very difficult and expensive. Yes, I am deep into buyers remorse and I can’t see a way out. At least when the platform worked reliably for the first two years I could pretend that things would get better.

But I’m losing page views, subscribers and my business is prevented from doing good things.The problems have been happening for some months now. Its not just today.

I do not recommend My New Rainmaker. I’m trapped and I can’t get out.

I heard about this poem play today by James Elroy Flecker and was delighted to read this. It strikes a chord with me.

SCENE II At the Gate of the Moon, Bagdad. Blazing moonlight. MERCHANTS, CAMEL-DRIVERS and their beasts, PILGRIMS, JEWS, WOMEN, all manner of people. By the barred gate stands the WATCHMAN with a great key. Among the pilgrims, HASSAN and ISHAK in the robes of pilgrims.

THE MERCHANTS (Together) Away, for we are ready to a man! Our camels sniff the evening and are glad. Lead on, O Master of the Caravan, Lead on the Merchant-Princes of Bagdad.

THE CHIEF DRAPER Have me not Indian carpets dark as wine, Turbans and sashes, gowns and bows and veils, And broideries of intricate design, And printed hangings in enormous bales?

THE CHIEF GROCER We have rose-candy, we have spikenard, Mastic and terebinth and oil and spice, And such sweet jams meticulously jarred As God’s Own Prophet eats in Paradise.

THE PRINCIPAL JEWS: And we have manuscripts in peacock styles By Ali of Damascus: we have swords Engraved with storks and apes and crocodiles, And heavy beaten necklaces for lords.

THE MASTER OF THE CARAVAN But you are nothing but a lot of Jews

PRINCIPAL JEW Sir, even dogs have daylight, and we pay.

MASTER OF THE CARAVAN But who are ye in rags and rotten shoes, You dirty-bearded, blocking up the way?

ISHAK We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further; it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave There lies a prophet who can understand Why men were born: but surely we are brave, Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

THE CHIEF MERCHANTS We gnaw the nail of hurry. Master, away!

ONE OF THE WOMEN O turn your eyes to where your children stand. Is not Bagdad the beautiful? O, stay!

MERCHANTS (In chorus) We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

AN OLD MAN Have you not girls and garlands in your homes? Eunuchs and Syrian boys at your command? Seek not excess: God hateth him who roams!

MERCHANTS (In chorus) We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

HASSAN Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells When shadows pass gigantic on the sand, And softly through the silence beat the bells Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

ISHAK We travel not for trafficking alone; By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

MASTER OF THE CARAVAN Open the gate, O watchman of the night!

THE WATCHMAN Ho, travellers, I open. For what land Leave you the dim-moon city of delight?

MERCHANTS (With a shout) We take the Golden Road to Samarkand!

(The CARAVAN passes through the gate.)

WATCHMAN (Consoling the women) What would ye, ladies? It was ever thus. Men are unwise and curiously planned.

A WOMAN They have their dreams, and do not think of us.

(The WATCHMAN closes the gate.)

VOICES OF THE CARAVAN (In the distance singing) We take the Golden Road to Samarkand. CURTAIN

On the podcast, Ethan uses Adobe Audition for editing and I’ve been using Apple Logic Pro 9. With the new release of Logic Pro X, I considered switching to Audition so we were compatible. I’m not a fan of Adobe as a company who have a history of doing what’s best for Adobe and not their customers.

Adobe wants to charge £17.58 per month or £210.96 per annum for their Audition on a subscription.

I expect Logic Pro X to have at least two year life which means £139 vs £421 is a huge difference in cost. I have no investment in either platform since podcast editing is reasonably straight forward. Not much magic happening.

Decision: My computer will continue to have zero Adobe products installed. It was a close call there for a few minutes. I’m nothing if not flexible though.

I record podcasts regularly - typically once a week at the Packet Pushers Podcast. One of the less obvious problems of podcasting is that I have to listen to my own voice during the edit process (which Ethan & I do ourselves). Even after 170 shows published to date, I still cringe when listening to my own voice. it’s personal excoriation that never ends.

Even though people think you would get used it, I never have.

I don’t think about the sound of my voice at all during a working day, or when associating with others. Your voice is just what you got when the genetic lucky dip delivered its goods. But when you are forced to listen to your own voice for hours every week, you start to adapt. I’ve noticed that my speech patterns are different from the earlier shows. I have less fillers (ums, ahs, pauses) in my speech patterns on the show and this is starting to carry over into my normal speech patterns. In fact, I was presenting to some colleagues a few weeks back and realised that I had unconsciously switched into ‘podcaster’ mode - this is where I project my voice for the microphone  with extra ‘tone’ and ‘colour’ ( I call it cheese because it sounds cheesy).

It takes about two hours to edit every one hour of published content. We do this editing because many of our guests are not experienced at public speaking and sometimes get hesitant about being in public which leads to a lot of ums, ahhs, well and over-talking  Ethan & I would rather have these conversations than to have a format where only semi-professional voices are on the show every week.

The last part is listening to your old podcasts is also painful. I listened to two of our early shows to assess how our professionalism has improved and what has changed. It’s quite obvious that my voice, tone and speech patterns are different.

This, of course, is also called practice and any form of practice improves. But you don’t think of the first 100 shows that you  create and publish as practice. 

Recording a Podcast on IPv6 with Kumar Reddy,  Andrew Yourchentko, Patrick Warichet and Alain Fiocco

If you take a battle scene in Star Trek and “deshake” using a video editor, it looks rather silly. Note Riker holding onto the chair to move himself around.

Awkard.

“Let’s clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.” Laurie Helgoe

As I continue to develop skills in using Mac OS X to produce better quality documentation, I’ve become more and more aware of fonts as part of the documentation process. Currently, I most aware of choosing fonts for diagrams.

I found this video on the history of typography to be very illuminating insight in the nature of fonts and why there are so many varieties.

I’ve previously written about choosing the right fonts at Georgia & Verdana – Typefaces for the Screen

Good laughs

Can’t find the exact reference, I think was from around May this year. It’s from http://www.smbc-comics.com/ Saturday Morning Breakfast Comics. They are great - you should add them to your RSS reader.

I am over new social media. And quitting most of the ones I already have. In the last two weeks I’ve literally cancelled dozens of useless social services (and finding out that most simply do not exist anymore). 

At first I was worried that I was missing out, or that this service would be better, or do something new. Simple fact is that I dont need anymore “stuff” - I need less interruptions and more focus. I bookmark at Pinboard, I don’t need Pinterest. I have my own blog, I don’t need Facebook. I have Twitter to get questions answered, I don’t need Quora.

I need to focus on my core competencies. Participation isn’t a core competency. Discipline, focus, rigour and research. That’s what matter. s

I’m not afraid of missing out, I’m opting out of having any more. 

^{Image Credit}

Learned something here. I didn’t even realise that you could do this.

I've been using the Guardian apps for the iPhone and iPad for a year or more. I've been reading the newspaper for much longer than that (I read papers on the left and right side of politics to in the hope of getting a somewhat balanced view - wishful thinking probably)

When the Guardian released their newsstand app for the iPad I was pleased to sign up and pay the subscription in Oct/Nov last year and support the business.

Today, I cancelled my subscription in frustration.

There are two primary reasons for this:

1. Advertising.
2. Crashing.

Advertising

My first and major complaint is the display ads. I'm tired of having content shoved in my face and constantly distracting me from my task. The ads that show in iPad app are full screen and require a click through. Because the "hot spots" on the page that click out to a website are in the same place as the page turn, I find that Safari opens.

This is dishonest. Flat out, infuriatingly, steal my screen time, infest my eyeballs type of dishonest.

Finally, the Guardian app is constantly reporting back analytics to their servers. It's consuming precious bandwidth from my 3G allowance for zero benefit.

I have the view that I've paid for the privilege to have a copy of the Guardian content, it should not be further encumbered with advertising.

Crashing

The final problem is that the app has started crashing regularly - starting from January. Most times on startup it will crash twice before staying open. When downloading the paper is will crash every second time during the download. And when reading the content it will also crash repeatedly.

As this is the only iPad app that crashes for me, I can only assume it is poor programming.

Summing Up

I could barely tolerate the ads in the early versions but the latest versions have many more ads and have spoiled the experience. When added to the app constantly crashing I'm cancelling my subscription and will stop reading newspaper altogether. I might buy the paper version occasionally, but I doubt it - it's doesn't work for my lifestyle anymore.

I don't have a better option than that.

Seems a fitting poem for Boxing Day as the day after Christmas Day. Now that the orgiastic feast of food, gifting and family is done, it’s time to feel a little let down. In this poem, Keats celebrates melancholy and the periods when you energy flags, your soul rests and your mind is looking for the exit.

Personally, I draw strength from this times of turning away from the drive to succeed, pressure to deliver and the race to completion.

Celebrate the sad times, they make the happy times sweeter. That’s what I find this poem says to me.

Ode to Melancholy

Though you should build a bark of dead men’s bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out, bloodstained and aghast; Although your rudder be a Dragon’s tail, Long sever’d, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa; certes you would fail To find the Melancholy, whether she Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

John Keats - Published 1918.

I was at the Cheltenham Science Festival today (with the girls, never too early to get girls interested in Science!!) and there a stand from GCHQ (UK Government Communications Headquarters which is the centre for Her Majesty’s Government’s Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) activities) and they had a genuine Enigma Code machine on display. It was working and able to encode and decode - just like during the war.

Click on the photos for larger versions.

This unit was made in 1937. This photo shows the overall unit. Note the three code wheels just above the lights that are part of the pre-shared key for the unit.

The next photo shows the front code selectors which used jumper leads in a preset configuration. Note the spare leads in the lid on the previous photo. The jumpers were connected according to predetermined pattern (pre-shared key) for a given day of the week.

Instructions, in German. Just above this was row where spare bulbs for the unit were kept (and some spares still exist)

A closer view of the keyboard and code selectors.

Had a day out with the family to Monmouth. To be fair, there is nothing specifically interesting about it. I took some photos that attempt to capture the mundane things that I see around me every day. I’m always surprised by these things.

In one of the many second-hand / charity shops: nothing says “1980” like a jester doll and brand new VHS tape, still in the wrapping.

This is a typical English pub, complete with yobs standing at the door having a cigarette (not allowed to smoke indoors anymore).

This pub doesn’t look like much but it’s been there a long time.

These two photos are the ambitiously named “Savoy Theatr”. It host various artists as well as cinema.

In this image, I like the dichomtomy between the much older church, and the newer buildings, that contain even newer shops.

I think the Flip was killed because Enterprise customers turned away from Cisco. People like me openly laughed and denigrated Cisco for “playing with toys” instead producing better products. And that cost more money, way more money, in lost sales at 65% gross profit margin than any consumer/retail product will make.

When you drop a billion bucks in revenue (as Cisco has) then you lose $400 million odd in profit because customers aren’t taking you seriously.

The Cisco Flip wasn’t killed by the iPhone 4 or smartphones in general. Or any other cameras. At least, smartphones weren’t the only problem - I’d guess that Cisco had more designs under way, but they didn’t execute well to bring them to market - at least, no worse than Canon or Kodak.

But losing that revenue is core business. That hurts.

That’s why they Cisco threw it away and didn’t bother to sell it. A $540 million mistake that needed to be over so as to stop the bleeding in the core business.

This also doesn’t bode well for the Cisco Cius tablet. It’s also a consumer product dressed up as an enterprise device. So far, I’ve not heard a single person who has touched and seen one say anything positive about the product. And it’s been around the place for a long time.

It’s not change that I fear, but the Change Management process itself.

Change Management is intended to reduce risk by encouraging responsibility and planning.

Change Management is often staffed by semi-retired technical types who know enough to be dangerous, and not enough to be wildly misinformed of anything new. A change reviewer has already seen the change hundred times before. A change creator is mired in a ton of pointless questions to create the simplest change. Big changes are so complex

In most organisations, Change Management just lets you know who to blame faster and more accurately.

Overcoming human nature is difficult. Overcoming the natural instinct to blame, or feel blamed, after a failed change requires a new approach to people management and team building that is rare. Really rare.

As a team leader, who has several executives who constantly speak trite phrases like

“risk is to be managed & accepted”, “we want to improve the process” “failure is not acceptable”, “we need to put resources into solving those problems”

When I face them down in a the blamestorming session after a major outage, they just want someone to victimise. They all know it isn’t going to fix anything. They all know that blaming a long serving employee who has taken years to develop those skills is counter productive.

And then refuse to sign off reasonable training budgets, practical lab environments, or professional learning time because Change Management has controlled the risk.

It’s not change that I fear, but the Change Management process itself.