On my first day at General Electric, January 6, 1969, I had a revelation about working within large organizations that was to guide my professional decisions ever after. Almost 20 years later, on my first day as president of NBC, August 26, 1986, those guidelines were severely put to the test.
The GE power transformer plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was huge—a massive brick and steel fortress covering 254 acres. Working there made you feel insignificant. Still, I was full of anticipation and awe the first time I passed through the big iron gates in front. But once I settled in to my work station and looked around me, I could see I was adrift in a corporate labyrinth. Everyone had their head down, going about their business. I was just a cog in a huge machine.
At the end of the day, I passed back through the huge stone walls and the large iron gates to the street. And I decided something that day. We all live and work behind institutional walls. Whether we spend our days in factories, high-rise offices, schools, the military, or even nonprofits, behind those walls, our individuality and enterprise are compromised by regimentation and ruled by the bottom line. But what I came to realize is that we must accept responsibility for our own success. If you want to maximize your talents, you have to take it upon yourself to move forward and find a way to make things happen. No one can do that for you. If the institution is not working for you, you have to accept responsibility for doing something about it, because the institution is not likely to help you achieve change. If you have ideas you want to develop, you may have to go outside an institution for the freedom and resources to do so. That’s what I mean by taking responsibility.
But I also learned that two other ingredients are essential: passion and control. When you take responsibility for creating change, you need to develop ways to control your ideas, and you need to nurture the passion that will keep you going in the face of setbacks.
One of management’s jobs is to figure out how to make people more productive, to identify and tap into their strengths. Then you have to empower them to think the unthinkable, do the undoable, and run with that permission. If you are able to do that, you can achieve great things, and they can, too.
I left GE twice and returned twice. I first came out from behind GE’s institutional wall in 1970 to be chief legal secretary to Judge Lawrence A. Whipple, chief judge of the US District Court of New Jersey. I left a second time in 1979 to build new cable systems as president of Cox Cable. Each time I returned to GE, I assumed a new leadership role in an area unfamiliar to me. In all of these diverse roles, I applied the same principles for success I developed in those early years at GE:
By the time I took the helm at NBC in August 1986, I had been studying NBC and contemplating the future. I was already applying what I had learned the previous 6 years at Cox Cable and GE Capital. I knew NBC’s financial vulnerabilities as well as GE’s expectations. I already knew what had to change, and I knew it would not be easy.
People at NBC generally felt disdain for RCA, their previous owner, but when GE acquired RCA, and thus became NBC’s new owner, they were outwardly fearful. They saw GE as a more formidable institutional owner with its own quirks and requirements. And they were not wrong. So NBC would still be stuck behind another institutional wall, and it was up to me to figure out how to set them free from GE and its own inhibitions. I was not put off by the wall of resistance I had to fight through as I told Crain Communications’ Diane Mermigas after taking the helm, “I have experienced the same thing in other places. I wouldn’t say that is alarming.”
As it turned out, I was the right guy for the job. I was fully convinced that relying solely on its broadcast base made NBC very vulnerable, that we would have to embrace cable if we were to remain competitive and financially viable. Anyone who took the time to look ahead could see that cable was on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and we needed to be a part of that. In fact, NBC already was late getting into the cable and satellite business when I got there. Because of my time at Cox (see Chapter 6), I understood the cable business. It was absolutely clear that the two media modes needed each other. But getting there, against the resistance of NBC executives, GE higher-ups, and the station affiliates, nearly killed me.
Bringing NBC into the cable age involved nothing short of a complete transformation, and we had to do it inside our corporate parent, GE, sometimes flying under the radar. It meant getting the right people in the right places with the freedom and support to grow a subsidiary by making acquisitions, starting enterprises, and hiring talent that GE would rather we didn’t. A great example is three executive producers I brought in from the outside—Don Ohlmeyer, Dick Ebersol, and Andy Lack. They didn’t exactly fit GE’s executive mold, but their unconventional sensibilities brought NBC to the next level.
We built teams of people who were committed to my vision of transforming NBC. Some of them were more ambitious than GE liked, but they all knew that I would back them to do whatever was needed to grow NBC. Our goal was to create a broadcast company much more significant for the changing times, and the challenge was doing that inside a conglomerate with a history of control and rigidity. So, my story is really about people who built tremendous value at a privately held company operated by guidelines of a larger public corporate parent.
Businesses are not like plants and animals. They don’t grow by themselves. You have to give them a lot of Miracle-Gro. You cannot have people just settle in to their assigned responsibilities to maintain the status quo. You must push through resistance to change, often through difficult circumstances, to secure a better future.
◆ Arthur Puccini, chief counsel General Electric plastics and chemical division. When GE bought RCA in 1986, it also acquired NBC, an RCA subsidiary, as part of the package. So Bob had the unhappy task of trying to integrate the culture of NBC into GE. NBC had to be approached different from GE’s other businesses because there was no tangible product, per se. You didn’t manufacture anything. The entertainment business is completely different in the way it is managed, so it took a lot of adapting on GE’s part.
Bob was able to integrate what he wanted and what GE needed with what existed, to come up with something that worked. He brought a whole new filter to that process. It was a gradual and steady move in the direction he knew they needed to go. ◆
◆ Pier Mapes, president NBC Television Network. One of the big problems GE inherited from RCA was a highly layered management structure. Bob eliminated layers of executive vice presidents who were good guys with big salaries and opted for just one executive vice president overseeing each of the primary areas. It allowed for many more voices and better productivity. NBC was lean, mean, and de-layered. When Bob Wright first walked in, we had 300 employees and 10 lawyers approving contracts. A year later, we had 200 employees and 1 manager of boilerplate legal contracts. ◆
GE headquarters auditorium
New York City
August 26, 1986
The formal announcement of my appointment as president of NBC was made in a studio at GE headquarters on August 26, 1986. Afterward, two or three dozen senior NBC people joined Jack Welch and me for lunch at the Four Seasons. Jack and I had it all orchestrated. He played the white hat, and later I was going to play the black. He told everybody how happy GE was to have NBC and we were going to have a lot of fun together, and everything was going to be great. Everyone was laughing and cheering, and I was thinking to myself, this is not going to be so much fun. Jack said good-bye and he disappeared, and I had to go back to my new office on the 6th floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, where I met with all the senior NBC executives and gave them my perspective on what GE was going to do with NBC.
So I gave them my view that we would need to be aggressive about growing the business. We had to determine if we could stay in radio, which was a poor performer at the time, and we had a labor contract situation about to erupt that we had to deal with in new ways. We had a lot of business development planned to make the network more competitive while we were growing new businesses. And that would be tricky since the NBC network had only one source of revenue at the time, advertising, which wasn’t going to be sufficient in the years to come. I leaned hard on the importance of selling programs to cable and even owning their own cable program services.
They didn’t like what they heard. They wanted to say, everything is OK now. It was difficult for them to comprehend what I was talking about and why it was important to embrace cable when their broadcast business was the dominant force in media. There was no big-picture perspective. But there was an insatiable interest in what people thought was going on under GE, so my confidential internal memos detailing change routinely made it into the next day’s newspapers, which complicated the process.
The other thing that I was not prepared for was the Wall Street analysts who followed GE back then. They liked and understood the GE-RCA merger, but they weren’t at all interested in NBC. They were industrial analysts who didn’t know anything about NBC or media. So, to mollify them, Jack made a point of telling them we were not going into the entertainment business; we were just doing a few television shows. And the TV shows would help sell the television sets and other appliances GE was making, so no one on Wall Street should be worried about it!
The problem with characterizing NBC as an industrial media company was that it made it harder for me to take risks by entering cable when, in fact, the biggest risk of all was repelling new technology. I spent much of my first year at NBC warning against complacency painfully evident in a 4-month labor strike by The National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians who were particularly dug in against change. NBC News and station affiliates flipped out at the notion we should launch our own cable news operation to compete with CNN.
At the same time, I was wooing the cable crowd. I knew they would be important partners in my growth plan for NBC, so at every opportunity I reminded them that if everyone was going to benefit from the coming growth in our deregulated industry, we all had to act cooperatively, not defensively. My ultimate strategy was to secure co-ownership positions in cable channels or systems or to create program services from scratch. To some within NBC, it looked like cavorting with the enemy, but it was the only recourse I had to save the network.
So from day one at NBC, I had a clear strategy and understanding of what needed to be done and a strategy for getting there. I knew where the broadcast television industry was headed and where cable had the potential to go. I had more opportunities than I ever expected because of the embryonic nature of the cable business I needed NBC to enter. I had everything but the funding and the green light, and for that I needed a more willing GE. From that point on I realized if I was going to accomplish anything I needed to at NBC, I would have to find ways to work around and within the institution. I would have to bring NBC out from behind GE’s institutional walls.
Successful change at any company depends on assembling, managing, and empowering the right teams of people. Mandating change and encouraging fresh ideas frees workers from institutional shackles. It unleashes creativity and productivity. It provides a path to innovating and creating new value. But it requires courage.
Formidable challenges prevailed the day I began work at GE in 1969, when I took command of NBC in 1986, and when we launched Autism Speaks in 2005. In every case, I learned to rely on my team to take ownership of those challenges, embrace new ways of thinking, and tackle things too often reserved for research and development. There is no telling where the next great idea or effort might be lurking in an organization. Give people a way to excel and distinguish themselves, and they will take it every time.
Transitioning operations and staff into the unknown is unnerving unless you are clear on the organization’s vision, guiding principles, and need for change. It can take years to guide a corporation through troubled waters—when months count. At times, you will be blown off course. That’s when vision and execution matter: when your vision is being executed by people who get it and buy into it, and are skilled and properly motivated to get it done. In the end, people make the difference; people make it happen.
We faced major obstacles creating and growing Autism Speaks. We had to maximize the skills and resources of mostly volunteers, both parents and professionals. We had to build awareness about autism and an appreciation for the value of a united national organization whose energy and momentum could drive change.
The inevitable clash of corporate cultures, agendas, and personalities can derail any project not adequately grounded in a chief executive’s strategy and conviction. Believing you can make a difference can be liberating. It enables you to overlook the fact that you might not have the right resources. It makes you believe that passion and determination just might be enough to propel you to doing great things, impossible things.
We so often walk into new jobs and companies bound by
existing standards and expectations. We are easily paralyzed by institutional pressures to conform and compromise. We are lulled into believing that circumstances and change are beyond our control. You’d be surprised.