"Maybe America's Great Stagnation isn't happening because we're failing—maybe it's happening because we're not.” That’s a theory put forth by business futurist Umair Haque.

Substitute “talk radio” for “America” and give that a listen. Thought provoking, isn’t it? The worst thing about radio’s current financial woes is our inability to take risks and try new things. There’s no room for error, and very few owners or managers are in the mood to take a chance on what might be the Next Big Thing. So, we continue to offer pretty much the same product we’ve been selling for 50 years; a host (sometimes two, occasionally three) shares his opinions, interviews a few guests and fields some calls.

Done and done—g’night everybuddy!

But as Haque warns:

“The unforgiving truth is that failure—the ability to fail gracefully, relentlessly, consistently—has never mattered more. In a world where volatility is punching past the outer limits, where global hyper-competition is reaching breakneck speed… where the velocity with which the self-organizing people formerly known as "consumers" can deconstruct your latest, greatest yawner of a hit down to the tiniest omission has gone terminal, where investors have their zombified eyes locked on the bottom line but rarely the prize, and last but very definitely not least, in a world where yesterday's tired, threadbare conceptions and definitions of success are ever less resonant—well, in this world, those who can't fail are likely to end up a little bit like America: stagnant, stuck, and struggling to redraw the boundaries of prosperity.”

Haque offers a “three word manifesto” for success in the 21st Century: Fail Bigger Cheaper. Businesses, he says, must re-learn the importance of taking chances on projects that offer potentially huge gains but have a high probability of failure. Vital to this process: figuring out how to keep the costs down during the experimental phase—and knowing when to bail on a dud.

We used to do that at radio stations. Remember this line, usually delivered with a shrug: “Yeah, that might work. Let’s throw it on and see what happens. We can always dump it.”

Read Haque’s full manifesto.