Dateline: Waiting to Explode
New York City
November 17, 1992
The scariest damn thing that happened at NBC, at least on my watch, came out of the news division, of all places. And it became a catalyst for jumpstarting all of NBC—news, entertainment, and sports.
It involved a rogue report on Dateline, NBC’s weekly primetime news magazine, called “Waiting to Explode.” (In retrospect, we can see the deep irony in the name.) It should have been a routine investigative report. Instead, it was designed—and manipulated—to generate ratings and attention by relying on high drama. Unfortunately, as it turned out, that drama was manufactured. Faked. It compromised NBC News’s integrity and standards in ways that were unthinkable to many people, including me.
The story examined General Motors trucks whose fuel tanks exploded when rear-ended. Intriguing premise—if it were only true. The producer, Robert Read, decided to make it more convincing by staging a rear-end collision involving a Chevy pickup that exploded into a fireball. It was rigged with an incendiary device, which was not disclosed to viewers. That’s the kind of thing that makes your heart sink. It defies everything a news organization stands for and works hard to achieve over time.
This is the risk you run when you empower people to take the lead and do what they think is right. They can make a wrong call for the wrong reason. I still believe it’s a risk worth taking, even though this particular instance nearly devastated us.
The investigative journalism that was supposed to foster ratings and pride became a black eye. Worse still, the ratings stunt nearly destroyed the news division’s credibility. News divisions were always considered the broadcast networks’ jewels. Once that chain of credibility is compromised, it can never be fully regained.
NBC News took a pounding from General Motors, which immediately launched an investigation of its own. GM executives openly challenged the report’s findings in a parade of press conferences, interviews, and articles. That generated angry telephone calls and correspondence from viewers who felt betrayed, and a lot of unhappy affiliates. Advertisers began yanking their commercials from Dateline. GM pulled tens of millions of dollars in advertising from all NBC News programs.
But it wasn’t until February 11, 1993, that we took extraordinary damage-control measures. At the end of that night’s Dateline, anchors Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips read a 3½-minute apology to head off GM’s defamation lawsuit. The statement, carefully crafted by NBC’s legal and news departments, called the crash footage “inappropriate” and conceded that “unscientific demonstrations had no place in hard-news stories at NBC.” NBC agreed to pay a $2 million out-of-court settlement that included GM’s legal fees and the cost of its internal investigation. Three of Dateline’s top producers associated with the report, including the executive producer, were dismissed. NBC News president Michael Gartner, who was unwilling to back off of his original written response to GM that he “did not believe that any statements made in the November 17 broadcast were either false or misleading,” resigned. Prior to this incident, Gartner had achieved so much for NBC News. NBC’s own internal investigation concluded that the report was the result of “bad judgment” and not intentional misinformation.
After the settlement was announced, I finally felt free to publicly comment, calling any such journalistic and administrative failures “indefensible.” By the time of the annual affiliate convention in Orlando that May, I apologized for the embarrassment and then promised to move on with the rebirth of the network.
The Dateline fiasco was the kind of self-inflicted wound and moral misstep that every chief executive dreads. And it was especially ill timed.
1992 was the worst year in my NBC tenure. Our aging slate of primetime series had fallen to third in the ratings as we tried to chase almost exclusively after younger viewers primarily owned by ABC. After having dominated the primetime ratings for 6 seasons, generating more than $500 million operating profits at the peak, we had just posted a huge loss—more than $60 million. We all were demoralized by how fast and hard NBC could fall.
The Dateline embarrassment came at a time when we were vulnerable on all programming fronts and on our revenue and cost line. But it sparked a complete overhaul of NBC’s programming—not just news, but also sports and general entertainment. Much of our later successes, especially in cable, can be traced directly to our triage efforts, even though at the time we couldn’t all see that far into the future.
The way I saw it, we didn’t just need time to regroup; we needed time to reinvent. Dateline was just the catalyst for change. So by 1993, I decided to turn over operations to the content makers in the trenches. NBC was first and foremost a content company, and we had to do that best or we couldn’t do anything else. We were going to clean house and rebuild.
◆ Pier Mapes. To appreciate Bob’s response to our predicament, you had to understand what was going on in television at the time. Rupert Murdoch and the Fox network had a tremendous impact on NBC and NBC News. Once the fledgling fourth network won the televised rights to football and a real foothold by 1994, Rupert started raiding the networks’ affiliates. Fox was hurting us all in the primetime ratings and our advertising sales. Before that, HBO and ESPN were taking some audience, but not a lot of money. Fox was the first major competitor the three networks had before cable exploded with an alphabet soup of channels like TBS and TNT and USA. That is the assault we were under in the 1990s. ◆
I made the bold call to hire three outside veteran program producers to bring their creativity to the executive suite, which normally was the domain of accountants and business-school types in three-piece suits. None of the three had experience overseeing a key network division, but they were all absolutely brilliant at creating outstanding content, and that’s what we needed. Dick Ebersol was already president of NBC Sports, Don Ohlmeyer became president of NBC Entertainment, West Coast, and Andy Lack was named president of NBC News.
While the news division’s problems were more publicized, all three key program hubs were troubled and in need of a new approach. All three of these guys were best known as free-spirited creators of successful content. I knew they would operate very differently from GE’s typical executives. They were not administrators; they were inventors. That was a huge jolt to NBC’s and GE’s already rattled sensibilities. But I needed for them to take some chances, push the envelope, and mix things up. I gave each of them a month to devise an initial game plan to begin rebuilding our ratings and reputation. We needed to take swift action, set things right, and move on.
◆ David Zaslav. The Dateline incident was the scariest moment in NBC’s history in my 20 years there because it was a breakdown of what NBC News and NBC were at its core. It put everything on the line. The idea that the news division would have faked something cut to the very essence of what we stood for at our best. Just when this happened, we were struggling to develop new hit series in primetime. It was a very difficult moment for us as a company.
I was at the meeting of NBC News and other network personnel in Studio 8H on April 12, 1993, when Bob made the announcement that changed the course of the company. He said that Andy Lack, Dick Ebersol, and Don Ohlmeyer—all three of whom were producers and not front-office executives—were going to run the company with him. They were reporting to him and running their divisions with plenty of autonomy.
That accomplished two important things: it got creative people running the company and helped Bob to convince GE and Jack Welch to get the hell out of there. We clearly were not going to win with a bunch of GE people running the show, based on the lows we had reached. But that was the positive legacy of it, and it was all uphill from there. Bob and those three—Lack, Ebersol, and Ohlmeyer—did a great job rebuilding and repairing the company after that. ◆
Dick Ebersol, Andy Lack, and Don Ohlmeyer had a lot in common. They were all producers of live events seen by large audiences, and they really loved what they did. They were inventive, forceful people with big egos and strong personalities. They were workhorses hungry to demonstrate they could accomplish more. I knew that the same qualities that made them ill-suited for GE’s corporate offices would make NBC a success.
Ohlmeyer wasn’t a scripted series producer, but he was a natural showman who knew how to create programs that millions of people watched. He began his career at ABC Sports as a protégé to the legendary Roone Arledge and had been a successful executive producer of NBC Sports events. Learning at the foot of the master how to negotiate and produce sports had prepared him for just about anything. Don looked at everything with a broader scope—and a brazen outspokenness. He had a real flair for unusual marketing and promotions, and he got involved in all aspects of sales, marketing, and station relations.
Andy Lack had impeccable credentials as a producer of acclaimed programs at CBS News. He had created the primetime news series West 57th Street, which offered a terrific real-time production style that was new to TV then. But like everything else in CBS primetime, the series lived in the shadow of the industry standard-bearer, 60 Minutes, where Lack also produced special reports that garnered him scores of Emmy, DuPont, Peabody, and other awards. I brought him to NBC, on a recommendation from Nightly News anchorman Tom Brokaw, to defuse the Dateline mess and breathe new life into our news shows.
Of all the three division heads, Andy probably walked into the trickiest situation. News always has been sacred ground to the broadcast networks, a loss leader where they were hesitant to make any dramatic change. Andy had some very good ideas and a more realistic sense of the new financial realities.
Incidentally, Lack was brought back to NBC in 2014 after leading Bloomberg News. His mandate: once again restore the news division’s reputation and ratings after Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was removed for fabricating information about his reporting experiences.
Dick Ebersol originally came to NBC in 1974, when he hired and then collaborated with Lorne Michaels to create Saturday Night Live and successfully launched his own Friday Night Videos, doing what he loved best—producing. He later moved to ABC Sports, where, like Ohlmeyer, he perfected his craft working for Roone Arledge. Then in 1989 I lured him back to head NBC Sports. I wanted him to apply the dramatic production and storytelling techniques he had learned from Arledge. He instinctively knew how to showcase and mine the human interactions that made for good television. And of course Lorne Michaels was as valuable in his own right, and even more enduring.
With Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels did something no one else has ever done: running a very difficult, very successful show on network television for more than 40 years. Guided by his genius, material has been created from scratch every week, 23 episodes a season, for 40 years. He has been the show’s executive producer from the beginning, which is extremely unusual in such a fluid business. Lorne hasn’t changed in all the years I have known him.
◆ Lorne Michaels, creator and executive producer Saturday Night Live. When Bob came to NBC Hollywood dismissed him as a lame cliché; a light bulb guy who didn’t know anything about our world. We’d come up through different paths, but after getting to know him I found Bob to be an incredibly smart man who was very respectful of what we did on the creative side. He was an intellectual peer who always kept an open mind. No matter what came up, he always had your back. He understood our job was to sneak through their power, but it had to be funny and have some intelligence behind it, and that’s very important; for creativity to flourish you have to feel protected. When you have that level of power and commitment and intelligence behind you, you can do amazing things. And you will take chances, and we did.
There was a wonderful moment with Bob and all of our SNL cast and writers meeting one weekend at the Mohonk Mountain House, which we did at the start of every new season. Bob came up with his oldest daughter Katie, and he talked about NBC as young, urban, and professional, which is where he wanted to go. Everybody came away from it with a clearly articulated vision of where he wants us to go that we never had before. No one had ever taken the time.
The show was in its 12th year developing a new cast which takes time, so Saturday Night Dead was the dominant headline. A lot of NBC’s west coast entertainment executives were ready to cut the show. When asked, Warren Littlefield bluntly said it was up for grabs. Then Bob did an interview with the New York Post, and he came to my defense saying SNL and Lorne Michaels were here for as long as they want to be, and that was a direct knock-out blow to the west coast. He protected me and for that I will be forever grateful.
When we did something on the edge on our live show, we’d talk about it before and after, and he’d generally listen and support—even though I’m sure things like Sinead O’Connor tearing up the picture of the Pope couldn’t have made Bob happy. You could just feel all the air go out of the room after that. I was doing this show that me and my friends in our 30s just wanted to watch. We pushed the boundaries because we had to give people something to stay home for on Saturday nights. ◆
Lorne was at NBC when I arrived there in 1986. He had worked as a writer on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In in Los Angeles for several years before moving to New York City to begin Saturday Night Live in 1975. He created television’s “informator” show—a cross between theater and satire, news commentary and improvisation. He has discovered and nurtured the talents of countless performers, including many who went on to be marquee names: stars like the Belushi brothers, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Steve Martin. Every entertainment chief before and during my time as head of NBC was concerned that the cost to produce SNL and what we were paying Michaels was about three times what they thought it should be!
Don Ohlmeyer, who was a producer and head of West Coast Entertainment, protested the loudest, and he and Lorne had a very bumpy relationship. It might have partly been the biting political commentary of SNL players like Norman Macdonald that Don personally didn’t like, or the significant property rights to the show amassed by Lorne over the course of his negotiations. I was under a lot of pressure then defending SNL to advertisers as big as AT&T and conservative right-wing groups like American Family, which had mastered the art of boycotting through mass mail-in campaigns. It was mostly edgy comments and recurring characters like the chain-smoking Vatican rock critic Father Guido Sarducci that sent the show’s opponents over the top.
Lorne invited me to attend a summer hiatus retreat for the cast and crew he hosted one year in Mohonk in the lower Catskills, about 90 miles outside of New York City. I brought my oldest child, Katie, an avid fan and new college graduate. Once the writers and cast spent the day with me, they realized I appreciated and enjoyed the creative process and would continue to be a valuable front-office advocate. I honed respect and kinship with Lorne and his crew. Lorne and I would frequently take time to discuss controversial sketches and moves. I think he and the show lasted as long as they have because of the way Lorne handled the controversy. He wasn’t aggressive and kept his talent out of fights. There was never any screaming or name-calling. I was very comfortable with creative people, and I enjoyed being with them. They didn’t have artificial limits, and they taught me that you never know how good it can be until you try something. You don’t often see that outside the creative industry in a place like GE.
◆ Warren Jenson. In the early 1990s when Bob was building out his management team, we went through some really tough stuff. There was the battle between David Letterman and Jay Leno to succeed Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show. There was the whole Dateline debacle. Nighttime ratings weren’t doing all that great at the time. And it seems to me, we were mostly coming up a day late and a dollar short. Every time we had a meeting about an idea we were going to pursue, the next day we would read in the trade papers about Rupert Murdoch having just done it. There was such furious, deal-a-day activity back then that it seemed someone was always a step ahead of you. One of the things Bob did was make the necessary changes midstream in 1992 so that we got through some of those tough events, and we got all of the right pieces in place. Our finance team could rip apart, analyze, and structure a transaction with the best of the best on Wall Street. Bob clearly had the support of GE. So we were able to go from reading about change to creating change and, I would argue, leading change on many fronts.
Andy Lack began to bring a different cachet to NBC News and tried to do something a little more avant-garde with The Today Show. Don Ohlmeyer coming to run entertainment was as big a deal as Dick Ebersol running sports. The two men were friends who shared a similar ABC Sports pedigree. People inside of NBC were shocked that the competition was being tapped to set things right. The shakeup was necessary to jumpstart the creative process, especially in primetime. Bob characterized the trio of new division heads as one-stop shopping for the creative community and a powerful front line that would restore NBC’s overall leadership. And that’s exactly what happened. ◆
Now I had three of my key coaches as producers; four, counting Lorne. Once everyone was on board, I urged them to reach beyond the old ways to reestablish NBC’s leadership. There is no substitute for creative energy in any organization. It unleashes the best, most astonishing ideas. It gives people permission to think outside institutional parameters. That’s exactly what NBC needed, and that’s what we got with these three free-thinking executive producers. Even through waves of GE-ordered cost-cutting, I ran interference with GE to protect their efforts.
Lack, Ebersol, and Ohlmeyer cultivated teams of executives savvy and daring enough to test, but not violate, GE’s rigid guidelines. We all knew it wasn’t enough just to fix problems and reset the dials the traditional way. Our initial forays into cable already were taking us far afield of NBC’s original structure and put us onto fertile ground for thinking about and doing things differently. Successful radical change was more important than a quick fix, and it depended on the ideas and courage of others.
This all unfolded against the backdrop of a media business whose fundamental economics were dramatically changing, and we were determined to change with it—or better yet, ahead of it. When you are at a company like NBC, one that has been successful but is in the throes of great change and has been acquired by an industrial conglomerate, you have two choices. You can either play your hand or you can just sit on your hand.
◆ Don Ohlmeyer, president NBC West Coast Entertainment. NBC approached me in the late 1980s a couple of times to run sports and news, but I didn’t think news was fixable at the time. Then Bob Wright came to me in 1992 about taking over the whole West Coast Entertainment operations. My initial reaction was, why would I want to do that? But it was an interesting challenge to take a television network from third to first place in a declining business of network television with cable exploding everywhere.
The only reason I took the job was to win. I didn’t care about all the heat I would get into doing what I thought was right. I didn’t care what other people thought. I only cared about what came across the tube and what the audience wanted. Everybody hates change, but they don’t argue when the numbers go up. ◆
I won support at NBC by demonstrating the value of bold change: Dick Ebersol and Randy Falco negotiated multiple Olympics commitments. Don Ohlmeyer and Warren Littlefield created bold series concepts and unusual marketing. Andy Lack recast The Today Show completely with a curbside studio in Rockefeller Center showcasing NBC News’s revitalized talent and newscasts.
After Brandon Tartikoff left in 1991 for a broader role at Paramount, Ohlmeyer and Littlefield swiftly moved to cultivate hits such as Seinfeld, Friends, ER, Frasier, Will & Grace, and even Late Night with Conan O’Brien. In the fall of 1993, the needle moved! We saw the turnaround begin with Seinfeld and Frasier on Thursday night and the official launch of Must-See TV—a phrase coined by our marketing executives John Miller and Vince Manze to launch NBC’s rebranding in primetime.
◆ Lorne Michaels. Bob was always just honest. It turned out to be the best way to handle the Carson/Leno or Letterman transition on the Tonight Show. The people in the East (I was one of them) lined up behind Letterman. Mike Ovitz had his own agenda creating another buyer for late night hosts.
Afterwards, there was a lot of acrimony within the network. Dick was also on the side of Letterman at the time. And we sort of dodged this. And Carson, who Bob had a relationship with, I think stayed neutral or at least didn’t talk to Bob about it. Carson later said he thought David Letterman was the heir apparent. When the decision finally came down, Letterman immediately went to CBS and Bob called me on a Tuesday night—our long writing night for SNL every week—to say the next morning he would announce a new late-night show following Tonight and that I would be executive producer. Bob said, “You’ll figure it out, and I know it will be okay.” That’s when I suggested having Conan O’Brien audition from the ranks of writers we had used. And even though it was very wobbly in the beginning, Bob remained incredibly supportive. ◆
We invested well over $40 million annually in development for several years that didn’t produce a single new hit. By 1995, there were signs the gamble was paying off, even in NBC’s news division, where change was so often compromised by long-standing practice and privilege.
With Don’s leadership, we developed new hit series and ruthlessly negotiated to keep our own hit shows (most notably ER) out of the clutches of the competition. We tapped Don’s ability to pull strings, force change, and launch new ideas while tolerating his brash, disruptive style. There was no disputing his game-changing brilliance, or his penchant for self-destruction.
When Ohlmeyer and Littlefield finally struck gold, they beat the competition by record margins and laid a foundation for NBC to generate record annual profits—more than $500 million. By 1997–98, ER was number one in the primetime ratings, Seinfeld was number two, Suddenly Susan was number three, Friends was number four, and so on. We had 8 of the top 10 shows in primetime that year. Bang, bang! We owned the business at that point.
NBC became the only profitable national television network during Ohlmeyer’s 6-year term. But Don, an Emmy Award–winning producer of sports and live entertainment, was eager to return to the production fold. So I was not surprised when he decided to leave at the end of his contract in 1999. He had fulfilled the mission and done a brilliant job of restoring NBC’s primetime and late-night mojo.
At the same time the entertainment division was succeeding, NBC News restored its integrity and profitability while extending its brand to cable on CNBC. We expanded our reach with CNBC Asia and CNBC Europe and started new ventures like MSNBC and Court TV. The progressive changes Lack made to Nightly News, Dateline, and The Today Show were best remembered for the street-side studio at Rockefeller Center and delving deeper into timely topics.
NBC Sports became the first network to secure the four major league franchises at one time in football, baseball, basketball, and the Olympics, which we began bidding for in multiple-year packages. The Olympics franchise became a signature of NBC Sports and a vehicle for elevating the entire network. By then, the NBC Television Network was earning more than $1 billion a year and was able to support our cable and sports initiatives.
All of this growth occurred with the strict cost controls demanded by GE, including trimming the workforce from 8,000 employees to fewer than 5,000 and saving the company nearly $120 million in overhead. Ultimately, the goal was to convince GE that NBC was a growth business, not just a recovering business.
My vision for NBC was decidedly different from the agendas of so-called media moguls like Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone. I wasn’t empire building, I was trailblazing. It was not unlike what was happening at Disney at the time, where Michael Eisner and Bob Iger worked brilliantly together to take their company to impressive heights. When he got his chance to lead Disney, Iger was phenomenally successful. And CBS’s Les Moonves was a close second.
All three of the senior creative executives did as well as they did because they had their own areas to manage with one mandate: improve the product and make it the best, most inventive that you can so the ratings and revenues will follow. But as gifted as they were, all were driven by huge egos and personal agendas that got the better of them from time to time.
By 1999, the chinks in the armor started showing. Andy Lack put on a full lobbying effort with Jack Welch, hoping to move into my position. And for a short time he succeeded. Just before Jack departed as GE chairman, he upended me in June 2001 by naming Lack to the new post of NBC president and chief operating officer. The following year, I quietly went to the GE board, of which I was vice chair, with concerns about why that arrangement wasn’t working. By January 2003, Lack abruptly left NBC to become president and chief executive of Sony Music, to the surprise of many, and I resumed control.
Don Ohlmeyer left NBC at the end of his contract term and returned to ABC as executive producer of Monday Night Football, and eventually he took up painting and teaching television communications at Pepperdine University. Dick Ebersol’s penchant for negotiating sports rights and Olympics deals on his own ran afoul of NBC’s new owners at Comcast, and they parted company in 2011. Dick remains a trusted senior advisor to the International Olympics Committee.
◆ Andy Lack, president NBC News and executive VP NBC. Bob laid the framework for us to take NBC’s greatest weakness and turn it into its greatest strength, and to take risks just at the moment that everyone expected NBC News to play it safe. Bob decided NBC was going to produce its way out of trouble.
So when I got there in 1993, there was an overwhelming appeal for new ideas—ideas we could chase with assurances not to worry if they didn’t work. Bob and Jack wanted us to be creative, take risks, and they would decide if there was too much of a risk. They essentially said, “Just lay out your thinking behind the wish list. We’ll fund it; we’ll support it if we believe in it. If you can persuade us, we’re off to the races together!”
Our mandate was to produce our way out of where NBC was. We set out to find the right people and back their ideas, and give confidence and responsibility to people for executing those ideas, knowing that some would work and others wouldn’t. In our case, we got really lucky because they all succeeded.
I don’t think any of the three of us were looking for management jobs at the time Bob convinced us to come to work at NBC. We had mostly avoided them for all the obvious reasons; being tangled in administrative stuff was not fulfilling. Bob had a new idea and a new design for how he wanted to run NBC. That evolved into Dick Ebersol having the most successful Olympics run of broadcast over a decade. It resulted in Ohlmeyer putting together an entertainment schedule that created Must-See TV. And it put into place for me the opportunity to give NBC the biggest strength in weekday primetime news of any of the three network news divisions as well as create a new event that changed morning television. What Bob and I did, by fixing Dateline first and then by reinventing The Today Show and creating a new studio outside in the plaza, was to set a new agenda for the entire news division. It gave us an opportunity to create an event every morning.
With that single move, the street-level studio for Today, we gained the trust of affiliates, and they gave us better clearances for all of our news shows. So by 1997, every NBC News show dominated the ratings. It was the most exhilarating project you can imagine. ◆
◆ Neal Shapiro, executive producer Dateline, NBC News president. Dateline had some protection from failure. The cost to produce Dateline was nowhere near what it was for a primetime drama series, which cost NBC millions of dollars when they didn’t work. We adopted a winning formula of reacting to news that happened, which was a weakness of most other news magazines like 60 Minutes. Even if we didn’t win the ratings, we made millions of dollars for NBC on multiple nights each a week. ◆
Not enough can be said for the countless skilled news professionals Shapiro and Lack inherited amid the Dateline chaos. The best of them was Tim Russert, our Washington DC bureau chief, who hosted and rebuilt Meet the Press, America’s longest running news show, with his keen political analysis and white-erase board visuals. Tim represented the individual excellence that made NBC News great again until a massive heart attack took him from us June 13, 2008. He was succeeded by David Gregory.
Most of the time, people just settle into their assigned work responsibilities. In that steady state, you’d be lucky if a business could actually maintain itself without going down. But that is not what will get you to greatness. For that, you need to do more than just maintain.
The formula is easy to describe, if not always to realize: Build a strong team, playing to everyone’s strengths. Require accountability. Give people the tools they need to excel. Energize people to accomplish more than they think they can. Unlock individual potential to yield greater creativity and soaring productivity. Wholeheartedly encourage creativity and risk taking. Clearly state a vision everyone can rally around, putting the organization before self. And be willing to accept some failure in order to succeed.
When I put the three creative producers in place to manage NBC’s leading businesses and craft its future, it was more than damage control. It was a solid, purposeful step on the path to transformation. That was the whole idea behind bringing Andy, Dick, and Don into the fray. They were able to get people out from behind the corporate wall to think and do things differently.
But news was not like entertainment or sports. It was and still is to some degree a sacred commodity whose integrity must be protected and defended. The loss of that integrity can be fatal. So what we did in saving NBC News from itself, protecting and growing its legacy, was hugely important to everything that came afterward.
Throwing money at a creative problem wasn’t the answer for NBC in the early 1990s, but hiring and enabling great talent was. One of your jobs as CEO is to find ways to allow your best people to be more productive. So many people have such great ideas that never come to fruition inside of a big company, either because they are squashed or because they have to serve the corporate parent’s greater needs. Sometimes your job is to just set them free.
One of the more unconventional ways I did this was issuing an April 23, 2001 memo to NBC’s senior management and affiliated station executives. I asked for their recommendations on how best to compete in a program universe in which HBO’s Sopranos garnered ratings and rewards because of the violence, language, and nudity—none of which were allowed on network television.
People are not perfect. You have to accept imperfection in order to strive for perfection. It’s kind of a contrary thought, but that’s what you have to do. If you are looking for perfection along the way, a lot of people are going to drop out. Creativity—which is essential to innovation, entrepreneurship, collaboration, and problem solving—is an imperfect process. But it will take a company to the next level.