Media Curmudgeon

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May 25, 2009

Sound Like Your CEO?

The June issue of the Harvard Business Review has a brief article in the Forethought section titled “Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders” by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman that describes the result of their research on 450 Fortune 500 executives. If you work in a large media company today, I’ll bet when you read the ten flaws, you’ll think it describes a CEO you know about -- even your own.

Read the ten flaws, post a comment (obviously using a synonym) and state the name of the media executive and the flaws that match him or her.

* Lack energy and enthusiasm. They see new initiatives as a burden, rarely volunteer, and fear being overwhelmed. One such leader was described as having the “ability to suck all of the energy out of any room.”

* Accept their own mediocre performance. They overstate the difficulty of reaching targets so that they look good when they achieve them. They live by the mantra “Underpromise and overdeliver.”

* Lack of clear vision and direction.. They believe their only job is to execute. Like a hiker who sticks close to the trail, they’re fine until they come to a fork.

* Have poor judgment. They make decisions that colleagues and subordinates consider to be not in the organization’s best interests.

* Don’t collabórate. They avoid peers, act independently, and view other leaders as competitors. As a result, they are set adrift by the very people whose insights and support they need.

* Don’t walk the talk. They set standards of behavior or expectations of performance and then violate them. They’re perceived as lacking integrity.

* Resist new ideas. They reject suggestions from subordinates and peers. Good ideas aren’t implemented, and the organization gets stuck.

* Don’t learn from mistakes. They may make no more mistakes than their peers, but they fail to use setbacks as opportunities for improvement, hiding their errors and brooding about them instead.

* Lack interpersonal skills. They make sins of both commission (they’re abrasive and bullying) and omission (they’re aloof, unavailable, and reluctant to praise).

* Fail to develop others. The focus on themselves to the exclusion of developing subordinates, causing individuals and teams to disengage.

Do any of the flaws apply to the CEO of a media company you know of or to your CEO? Post a comment (obviously using a synonym) and leave the name of the media executive and the flaws that match him or her. One thing not mentioned in the HBR article is that most CEOs are disgustingly overpaid – certainly most major media company CEOs are. You can add that to your list, i.e. Barry Diller - Doesn't learn from mistakes, fails to develop others, and is disgustingly overpaid.

Post your list; it probably won’t change anything, but you’ll feel a whole lot better.

Posted by Charles Warner at 4:04 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

Bruce Braun at May 29, 2009 6:08 PM writes:

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May 19, 2009

Which Media Companies Will Fall?

The cover of the current (May 25) issue of BusinessWeek features Good to Great author Jim Collins, and inside the issue is an exclusive excerpt from his new book How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In.

Collins is the author (Good to Great) or co-author (Built to Last with Jerry Porras) of two of the top-20 best selling management books of all time, both of which are in line with a management research tradition of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Stanford’s Tom Peters with Robert Waterman of McKinsey & Co. began the management blockbusters that came out of the Stanford Business School with the best selling management book ever, In Search of Excellence.

In Collins’ latest research he looked into why great, highly successful companies, such as Bank of America, Fannie Mae, and Circuit City plummet into a steep decline and even fail. In the BusinessWeek excerpt, which, if you’re interested in management, I urge you to read, Collins identifies Five Stages of Decline:

1. Hubris born of success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death

A sidebar has an illuminating comparison of “The Dynamics of Leadership-Team Behavior” in which behaviors of teams on the way down are compared to behavior of teams on the way up. He is the list of the behavior of teams on the way down:

- People shield those in power from unpleasant facts, fearful of penalties and criticism for shining light on the rough realities

- People assert strong opinions without providing data, evidence, or a solid argument

- The team leader has a very low questions-to-statements ratio, avoiding critical input and/or allowing sloppy reasoning and unsupported opinions

- Team members acquiesce to a decision but don't unify to make the decision successful—or worse, undermine it after the fact

- Team members seek as much credit as possible for themselves, yet do not enjoy the confidence and admiration of their peers

- Team members argue to look smart or to further their own interests rather than argue to find the best answers to support the overall cause

- The team conducts "autopsies with blame," seeking culprits rather than wisdom

- Team members often fail to deliver exceptional results and blame other people or outside factors for setbacks, mistakes, and failures

As I read this list I couldn’t help but see in my mind’s eye meetings in media companies I am familiar with. Read the two lists again and then close your eyes and imagine one or two large media companies today. Which ones do you see that are in any one of the Five Stages of Decline. Which ones do you think will make it and which won’t?

Here are my picks:

Won’t Make It (Stage Three, Four, or Five)

Time Warner (not including AOL) – Hubris and Undisciplined Pursuit of More personified.

CBS -- Hubris and Denial of Risk and Peril plus Sumner Redstone equal bye-bye.

News Corp. -- Undisciplined Pursuit of More and Murdoch’s age. What will News Corp. do without the wily, strategically brilliant, ferociously competitive Murdoch? A slower death than Time Warner and CBS, but Miller at MySpace has made too many dumb moves to recover.

Yahoo! -- If it doesn’t become Microhoo, it’ll be toast. Portals are buggy whips.

Conde Nast -- Virtually an all-print company – worse than buggy whips.

Will Make It

Google -- Like it or not, it’ll last as long as the Egyptian Old Kingdom.

Disney -- Brands such as ESPN and Pixar are positioned for the digital age.

Viacom -- Only if its solid assets are acquired by someone who knows how to manage them properly; has to get out from under the Redstone anchor that’s pulling it down.

NBC -- As long as it has GE’s deep pockets and management expertise, NBC will stick around if eventually as only a news brand.

Might Make It

AOL -- Armstrong is off to a good start, but the deck may be stacked against him unless he and his new AOL people can develop extraordinary content.

Scripps Howard -- Transitioning out of print as fast as possible and doing it well.

The New York Times -- Has to make it; someone has to get it away from the Sulzberger’s and admit it’s a non-profit national treasure.

What companies are on your lists?

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:26 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

May 13, 2009

Silicon Alley Insider: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Like the character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the website Silicon Alley Insider has a split personality – when it’s good, it’s very good and when it’s bad, it’s awful.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Stevenson’s book:

The work is known for its vivid portrayal of a split personality, split in the sense that within the same person there is both an apparently good and an evil personality each being quite distinct from the other. The novella's impact is such that it has become a part of the language, with the phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" coming to mean a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.

“Vastly different in moral character” is the key concept. So, when is a website or a blog moral? More and more, I’m afraid that readers’ definition of moral is “it agrees with me.” In this age of confirmation bias, we seek out only those opinions that agree with our own prejudices, regardless of the facts (note that I didn’t write, “regardless of the truth,” because I don’t know there is such a thing as absolute truth). Truth, like beauty, tends to be in the eye of the beholder, or, in this discussion, the reader.

Last week I wrote a critique of Silicon Alley Insider scribe Nicholas Carlson, a 26-year-old former writer for the snarky Valleywag blog, because in my opinion he went beyond writing the news about new AOL CEO Tim Armstrong to writing opinion about how Armstrong should compensate salespeople. I pointed out that Armstrong is infinitely more qualified to make incentive decisions than Carson is.

The day after I wrote my critique, several things happened: First, I got about a dozen e-mails and comments cheering me on for going after Silicon Alley Insider. One high-level former AOL executive complemented me for trying to set the record straight because this person felt that SAI had been terribly biased in the past against AOL. Another person, a current AOL employee, wrote:

The vast majority of employees are incredibly excited about the things Tim is doing. Dulles morale has rebounded from an all-time low at the beginning of the year, and is now soaring. Over 2000 employees have met with Tim in small meetings where he asks the important questions and actually listens (and writes down) our responses. I have spoken to hundreds of employees, peers and co-workers about Tim's actions and have not heard a single negative comment.

Please do not judge the majority of AOL workforce by a few blog comments on SAI. I'd bet many of the ones who claim to be at AOL are either only pretending or are bitter ex-employees.

The other thing that happened was that I was apparently taken off of SAI e-mail distribution list. I have been receiving SAI e-mail updates every weekday for over a year. I assign the SAI as required reading in several of the graduate courses I teach at The New School. I’m not going to retaliate by taking SAI off my recommended reading lists, and I’m not going to ask for a refund to the website’s 2009 StartUp June conference I paid for. That would be small and wasteful.

Nor would I cancel the Business Insider’s Chart of the Day, which yesterday showed “The Slow, Painful Death of Landline Telephones.” Good stuff.

But what the apparent cancelling of my e-mail notifications caused me to do was to compare the websites’ newsfeeds and RSS feeds I get daily to see which ones I thought were most worthwhile and informative. Since I am a teacher, naturally I’ll give grades.

All Things Digital - Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg, and their colleagues consistently do the best job of reporting on the Internet, the tech industries, and consumer technologies. Swisher has the best sources in the business, especially among the big players in Silicon Valley. I like the website’s Ethics Statement on the pages of the individual contributors. I like the fact that Swisher and Mossberg are seasoned journalists and that Swisher went to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She knows what’s journalistically moral and what isn’t. A

Paidcontent.org - This site’s newsfeeds contain “just the facts, m’am.” No videos or fancy graphics, just straight news – too much of it in fact. Some days I may get 50 RSS feeds it seems. The writers rarely write anything that’s fun to read, but, to me, that’s a plus. I know what I’m getting. Paidcontent.org is often first with the news and it’s comprehensive. A-

TechCrunch - I don’t always understand the daily e-mail updates, but I know the Tech Crunch writers, especially Michael Arrrington, know what they are writing about – it’s the most technically sophisticated writing that a non-geek can comprehend. B+

John Battelle’s Searchblog - He wrote the book on Google (Search) and stills knows more about what going on with the Internet behemoth. His sources are impeccable. B+

Buzz Machine - Jeff Jarvis infuriates me with his self-promotion, self-righteousness, and arrogance, but every time I delete his RSS feeds, I have to put them back. There’s just too much good thinking and reporting to ignore. Hold your nose and don’t pay attention to about 40 percent of what he writes, but the other 60 percent is, dammit, worth reading. B

Silicon Alley Insider - Depends on who writes a story. Henry Blodget does some excellent analysis. I like the fact that on the site (Business Insider, too) the writers post their financial interests, so we know where they’re coming from. I’d like to see an Ethics Statement, too, but that’s probably asking too much. Dan Frommer is a good writer and reporter – he went to the Medill School of Journalism (Northwestern), so he knows what he’s doing. Read Frommer and Blodget. Don’t bother reading Nicholas Carlson, he’s too gossipy and sensational. Also, remember than these wimps can dish it out but can’t take it – they’ll probably cancel your account if you criticize them. B-

In other words, when reading blogs and Internet websites that cover Internet businesses, read entries written by Dr. Jekyll, not Mr. Hyde.

Posted by Charles Warner at 9:26 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

May 6, 2009

Tim Armstrong Gets It Right, Silicon Alley Insider Gets It Wrong

In an interview with Advertising Age Editor Jonah Bloom at the AAAA Leadership Conference, AOL’s newly appointed CEO, Tim Armstrong gave some insight into his plans for the beleaguered Time Warner unit. But you had to listen carefully to what he said to get a sense of what he was planning.

Many of the snarky blogs that follow Internet businesses, countless online industry watchers, and most current AOL employees listened poorly or with their usual confirmation bias and, thus, took away from Armstrong’s remarks on the Ad Age video and from his subsequent personnel moves and communications something to reinforce their own prejudices, fears, and shallow thinking.

I’ll pick on just one blog to make my point, but there are numerous examples of selective perception and confirmation bias that I could select in this current era of uninformed, personal-aggrandizing, opinionated, biased reporting on blogs, newspapers, and, especially cable news channels (Dobbs, Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, Olbermann, Maddow, e.g.).

The influential Silicon Alley Insider is widely read by people involved in or interested in the online industry. The first word I received about Google’s Tim Armstrong replacing the inept Randy Falco as CEO of AOL was in a Twitter from Silicon Alley Insider’s Editor in Chief, Henry Blodget, and his blog has been on top of the story since then.

The Insider has been all over the Armstrong story like a wet blanket and has excellent inside sources. The Insider has published memos to the AOL staff about moves Armstrong is making, such as the memo he wrote on why he broomed AOL sales chief, Greg Coleman, and the memo AOL Platform-A sales chief Mark Ellis, sent out May 4, about using SalesForce to track calls.

The Insider’s lead writer on most of the AOL/Armstrong stories is a 26-year-old editor named Nicholas Carlson, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, before he came to Silicon Valley Insider, was an associate editor at Nick Denton’s gossip blog, Valleywag, and before that was a client associate at Merrill Lynch. Carlson wasn’t at Merrill Lynch when his boss, Henry Blodget, was there. Blodget got banned for life from the securities business for touting Internet stocks in his analyst’s reports that he thought were “crap,” as revealed in private e-mails.

Carlson lists as an accomplishment in his LinkedIn profile as having won first prize in the Davidson College Vereen Bell creative writing awards for a short story, “Scrambled Eggs.” Blodget was also a writer before he was an analyst – a free-lance journalist after he graduated from Yale. Blodget proved he was a creative writer writing stock analyses for Merrill Lynch, and Carlson has shown he is a creative writer in his blogs about AOL, Armstrong, and Armstrong’s new head of global advertising and strategy, Jeff Levik.

Carlson may be a good writer, but he has no clue about management, leadership, sales, or compensation theory or practice. In an Insider post titled “AOL’s Advertising Systems Overload” on May 4, Carlson wrote:

Memo to new AOL ad sales boss Jeff Levick: We have two quick things to slot in at the top of your to-do list: 1. Make it easier for ad sales people to sell premium inventory. 2. Create incentive for them to do it. One big reason AOL ad sales were down 20% during the first quarter is that AOL sales people lean too much on the company's in-house, low-priced advertising network, Advertising.com, instead of pushing clients into higher-priced premium display advertising. But even though this is bad for Time Warner's (TWX) online subsidiary, it turns out we can hardly blame the sales people.

Oh, Nicholas, you mean incentives like Merrill Lynch gave Henry Blodget to lie about stock he thought Merrill Lynch clients should buy and incentives that Merrill Lynch gave its brokers to churn clients’ accounts to increase commissions, line their pockets, and screw their clients. Or like the incentives banks gave loan officers to make stupid loans – incentives the government is now looking to regulate so that people who make loans only get incentive payments if the loans perform over a reasonably long period of time. It was the mistaken notion that money is the only thing that motivates people that was the main cause of our current economic melt down. It was the wrong incentives that fueled the rapacious greed on Wall Street. But since Nicholas Carlson’s only job before writing gossip was at Merrill Lynch, he has no other reference point for knowing about incentives other than those that incentivize greedy, unethical behavior on Wall Street.

Before you give advice to Tim Armstrong about incentives, Nicholas, I suggest you begin your education on incentives by reading Fredrick Hertzberg’s classic Harvard Business Review article “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” and from there move on to my paper “Compensating Media Salespeople,” which includes extensive references to research on the subject, and, unlike the HBR article, it’s free.

And before you (and others inside and outside AOL) poke fun at Tim Armstrong for getting AOL employee’s involved in writing a new mission statement, read some of the most highly regarded management books of all time, Collins and Porrass’s Built to Last and Collins’ Good to Great, and then you might understand why Armstrong is on the right course.

You and others who have no clue what Armstrong is doing look at the Ad Age video again carefully and you then might understand why he hired Jeff Levick, who understands how to create value by using analyzing data (read Competing on Analytics).

The odds of Levick and Armstrong improving on what Falco, Grant, and their string of inept cronies screwed up are huge. But, you wouldn’t know that, Nicholas, your job is to write gossipy disses that get headlines, not to provide knowledgeable insight.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:27 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

May 1, 2009

Music Torture

Torture has been in the headlines in the past week. Should Obama have released the torture memos? Should we prosecute those who approved torture?

The topic was covered in a typically thorough and insightful manner by my favorite podcast, NPR’s “On the Media” in its April 24th program in a section titled “The Sound of Pain.” In that segment, Brooke Gladstone interviewed writer David Peisner about how U.S. interrogators used music, in addition to waterboarding and sleep deprivation, as a torture technique.

Here’s part of the transcript:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I wonder whether you could find any rhyme or reason to the kind of music that you know has been chosen in Guantanamo and in Iraq.
DAVID PEISNER: One thing that is fairly certain is the music that was picked was picked partially because it was aggressive and loud, and it was also meant to be insulting to a Muslim. A lot of very devout Muslims don't believe they, you know, are allowed to listen to music at all, let alone sort of Western music.
And there are a huge number of cases of pro-American songs. Neil Diamond's song America.

Not as bad as waterboarding, but listening to blaring Neil Diamond singing day and night is close. And music torture also has the advantage of not being as strenuous as waterboarding for the interrogators – all they have to do is plug up their ears and turn up the volume.
I could get my wife, Julia, to admit to anything by playing any Andrew Lloyd Weber musical soundtrack. She could retaliate effectively and get me to admit to eating raspberry tarts behind her back by playing any John Tesh or Barry Manilow album. Here are my top five Instruments of Torture:
1. John Tesh
2. Barry Manilow
3. Any opera
4. Any Mahler symphony
5. Metallica or KISS (tie)

What music would it take to make you confess? What music do you consider torture? Please post your list … and then maybe you will have some sympathy for those who were victims of this inhumanly cruel method of “extreme interrogation.”

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:59 AM | Comments (1) | Print |

Bruce Braun at May 1, 2009 7:18 PM writes:

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