Every decade has its personalities. In the 1980s, people on Wall Street started appearing on society pages. All that money from bull markets and deregulation turned both the players and the scorekeepers of yields and P/E ratios into superstars. Louis Rukeyser made stock-picking a hot Friday night television show. When hostile takeovers and junk bonds became the rage, bond traders became “Masters of the Universe.” My former partner, John Gutfreund, was anointed King of Wall Street. Until then, there hadn’t even been a Prince. Michael Milken graced magazine covers by uprooting corporate boardrooms for better and worse from his perch in tony Beverly Hills. T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, and Ron Perelman moved from page 41 to page 1. Gossip columnists Liz, Suzy, and Cindy pounced on a new set of glitterati: the financial moguls and their wives, who, with jewels and couture, moved from middle class to aristocracy at a speed only new money and a good PR firm could deliver. Even Ivan Boesky joined celebrity status when he said a little greed was good—just before he went to jail.
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I was not yet part of all that. I wasn’t in the newspapers. It had been years since I’d left Salomon and was quoted as the definitive expert on stock market direction. Entrepreneurs in the booming 1980s were commonplace. My company, still using our initial catchy moniker, Innovative Market Systems, was small and virtually anonymous. Our product, the market data Terminal that we were selling to Merrill Lynch and called Market Master, could have been confused with a kitchen appliance. No one knew us. No one cared about me.
But by 1984, this was about to change. Those were the days when Ronald Reagan proved how marketable ideas could be when they were peddled with charisma. You needed a spokesperson for mass appeal. Consumers and the media identified products and policies with people who pitched them: Chrysler Corporation’s comeback was built around Lee Iacocca, the person. Nike didn’t just make sneakers, it pushed them with a mystique that could come only from Michael Jordan. To have the best mousetrap wasn’t enough; success was delivered by people promotion.
If we were going to build our business, we, too, needed a personality. The obvious choice? Me. Our competitors’ founders, Messrs. Dow, Jones, Reuter, Knight, and Ridder, were all dead. I, on the other hand, was alive and out making speeches and sales calls every day in city after city around the world, turning my name and work into a great weapon that others in the financial news and market data businesses couldn’t match. And since I’d spent so much time demonstrating our product, people had begun to mentally interchange me with the Terminal. It was only a matter of time before traders and salespeople began referring to the black box on their desks as the Bloomberg. “Jack,” some trader might say to his boss, “I’d like one of those, what do you call them? You know, the machines Mike Bloomberg sells, one of his ‘Bloombergs.’”
When we had an opportunity to change company names (a potential trademark conflict arose with the Market Master name), I acquiesced to a decision the marketplace already had made. Henceforth, the product and the company itself would be “Bloomberg.” As my friend Harvey Eisen said, “An ethnic name—and all the more memorable for it.”
So, just as my old partner Billy Salomon ran Salomon Brothers as his company, with his name and his reputation on the line, now it would be me and my name at risk. I would become the Colonel Sanders of financial information services, the target for clever barbs from acerbic columnists, but simultaneously the one whose company and product would be on everyone’s lips. I’d delegated day-to-day company management to trusted lieutenants so I was free to travel. I was good at giving presentations and, from my Salomon days, already had years of practice representing a company. As the owner, by definition, I spoke with authority. And to make good copy, I gave the press a colorful personality to focus on. I was Bloomberg—Bloomberg was money, and money talked. Perfect!
Of course, no one does it alone. Telling your own story is only part of getting great press. In the quest to get Bloomberg recognition, our competitors deserve some credit too. Reuters let it be known it was developing a new system its executives haughtily dubbed the “Bloomberg Killer.” Journalists love such stories and gave it maximum play. (While there are advantages to running an eponymous business, sometimes there are unintended effects on your family. My young daughter Georgina burst into tears when she saw a framed article with the headline “Bloomberg Killer!” She thought that her Daddy was the target of assassins. “No, George, not me; just the company.”) Henry Becher, a Dow Jones vice president, told Forbes, “You tell that fella [Bloomberg] I’m gonna get him.” Thanks, we needed that. Then six large banks and brokers formed a market data consortium named the Electronic Joint Venture, or EJV, for short. It was positioned by their people, and by me every chance I got, as targeting us. Another Bloomberg Killer. Spare me.
Journalists are just like you and me—well, sort of. They try to do their jobs and get home to the kids. If you make filling inches and minutes easier for them, they’ll help you every time. What more of a layup could our competitors create? David versus Goliath! Murder threats in computerland! Ganging up on the little guy! It’s hard not to feel sorry for the old giants. No wonder we became everyone’s favorite.
Today, new entrants to the market have tried to flip the script on us, positioning themselves as David to our Goliath. The press always loves the story: “The new Bloomberg Killer!” But at least so far, it always ends the same way. And as long as we continue to be driven by our forward-looking culture, instead of looking over our shoulders and following what the competition is doing, we’ll be fine.
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The next step to notoriety was Bloomberg’s expansion into broadcasting. Radio and television were the furthest things from my mind at the end of 1991, when I got a call from Jon Fram, a fast-talking executive bearing a faint resemblance to Groucho Marx. Jon was an employee of the Financial News Network (FNN), a television channel whose parent was in bankruptcy. He told me I should buy FNN in its entirety. “Mike, what you really need to do is television. It will create synergies with everything else you’re doing.”
“What a dumb idea,” I said, cutting him off. My operating principle has always been build, don’t buy. Besides, what did we have to do with television?
“Look, just give me five minutes in your office. It won’t cost you a cent and I can show you a great opportunity.”
I’ve always had sympathy for a guy with an idea or two who doesn’t take no for an answer. So Fram came over for a cup of coffee. A total waste of time. We weren’t going to spend $200 million or whatever it took to buy TV distribution, no matter what he said. Dow Jones and General Electric could battle each other for that privilege. After a courtesy listen, I told Fram we had nothing further to talk about and made it clear he was leaving.
Fram called back the next day as if we were now old friends. This time he suggested that instead of buying a network, we needed someone in-house to develop audio and video programming at Bloomberg. Actually, he said we needed three people: himself; one of the on-air talents at FNN, Bob Leverone; and a young producer, Janet Weinberg. Once again, I said television and radio made no sense for Bloomberg and hung up the phone.
A few days passed, then I got another call from Fram. This time he rattled off a whole bunch of reasons why Bloomberg Financial Markets was made for TV. As I listened to a longer version of the pitch he’d made a few days earlier, it occurred to me, “One of us is stupid—and it isn’t him!” So I hired the three of them that day, and we took our first steps into the world of sound and pictures.
First, we bought a New York City radio station, WNEW, 1130 Kh on the AM dial. For decades, WNEW had been the closest thing to your father’s radio station. I guess that’s one of the reasons it was for sale. Much to the annoyance of its loyal but dwindling listeners, we had no intention of playing Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby into the millennium. The $13.5 million we paid (an amount that constituted one-third of its market value twelve months later) provided us with the station’s broadcast license and a 50,000-watt transmitter —not their studios, not their record collection, not their people, not even their call letters. Our programming would be an extension of our other news coverage: politics, diplomacy, lifestyle, science, business, markets, the economy, war, and peace. We would not do sensationalism. Our general standard would be: If I wouldn’t want my children listening to it, it’s not suitable for us to broadcast. Those wanting “all crime, all the time,” the staple of much news radio, could go elsewhere.
We started day one by ignoring the fundamentals of conventional radio: no murder and mayhem, no prima donnas. Gone were the breathless on-the-scene reporters stumbling over the usual banalities, the self-important producers, and the separate on-air anchor talents whose only talent was reading others’ copy and whose egos never quite get enough massaging.
We built technology for both efficiency and creativity: Our people had capacities and capabilities the competition could only dream of. Instead of using traditional audiotapes, we were completely digital and computer-based from the beginning. Reporters recorded their voices on a PC in a manner little different from writing text. The computer then fed the sound to the transmitter at exactly the time we wanted each story to be heard. Moreover, we could use the same prerecorded piece in multiple shows. Independent radio stations that became affiliated with us around the world could insert discrete Bloomberg-supplied stories into their lineups, or take our programming in a different order from the one we broadcast in New York. They just told the computer which story they wanted, when, and where—and out it came. Recording segments into a computer also enabled reporters to write, voice, edit, produce, and introduce pieces on their own. They could even go from radio to television and back several times during the day, using almost the same scripts for both media.
Bloomberg was breaking and remaking all the rules. For the radio industry, we were more than a little strange. We were crazy. I liked that.
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Our first venture into television was to produce a daily thirty-minute morning show, Bloomberg Business News, for Maryland Public Television. Syndicated throughout the United States, it was a hit from the beginning. While Bloomberg didn’t make any money distributing over Public Broadcasting, as with our contributions to National Public Radio, we got notoriety, and the audience, which included our clients, appreciated it.
People often asked me why Bloomberg ventured into radio and TV. Was there some hidden motive—for example, an executive who moves his company closer to the golf club and then declares, “The labor force is better there”; or a mogul who buys a film company for its “communications value,“ when his secret urge is to associate with movie stars?
Other companies make money in radio and TV—lots of it. Why shouldn’t we? We have the necessary information and the technical know-how, so broadcasting’s an easy extension of what we do elsewhere. Radio and television provide our company with instant visibility. The media like nothing better than writing about themselves. The more exposure Bloomberg has to the Fourth Estate, the more they’ll promote us to the general public. To reach potential customers who don’t yet subscribe to our print products, radio and TV help us get our message through. The people who lease our Terminals are part of radio and television’s masses. They need news while jogging, showering, driving, or sitting at home, and we’ve got to give them what they need. Last, our competitors do radio and TV. That doesn’t require us to do it too, but the fact that we do shouldn’t surprise anyone. For some time, we’d been offering letters, numbers, sound, and pictures over our Terminals to financial and investment professionals, selling a worldwide news service to newspapers, and publishing a magazine. Radio and television simply became other delivery mechanisms for the same content. Politicians, entrepreneurs, sports stars, celebrities, company officials, and business leaders interviewed for one Bloomberg media form get distribution via all the others as well. The more exposure the interviewees get, the happier they are to answer our questions, the more they make themselves available, the more product we have for all our ventures, and the more we can sell. Radio and TV enhance the appeal of our Terminal and our publishing—and vice versa.
Bloomberg offers two kinds of media: broadcast communications, where many consumers get the same information simultaneously; and narrowcast communications, for small groups. Most people use both daily. Many watch or hear the day’s key sporting event live, or view a new movie when it’s released. Many at the same time: broad consumer interest, as with traditional television or radio broadcasting. Some watch less popular programming or they view the popular content at a different time from everybody else: narrow demand, since there are very few receiving it at any one instant. Another narrowcast media form used daily is interactive electronic communications, involving only one party (you, via your smartphone, to and from a database) or two individuals (you, having a telephone conversation with a friend). Bloomberg, albeit with a serious focus, must deliver both kinds of “casting” or risk leaving its customers unsatisfied.
At Bloomberg, the most customized narrowcast product using the phone system is our Help Desk. Thousands of our customers call with requests for technical help each day. They all get to interact (the technical term for two people talking) with a human being. Depending on the day and time, the helper’s accent may be different, but the service isn’t. On the East Coast, call Bloomberg anytime. In local daytime, New York answers. Call late in the evening, and Singapore or Sydney will take that same call as if they were across the street. You don’t know the difference. Call Hong Kong during their nighttime hours, and Frankfurt or São Paulo may have the honor of providing assistance. That’s what internationalization is really about. That’s what service is all about. That’s what useful technology can do.
We also offer instantaneous help through the Terminal. Click HELP on the Terminal and get immediate access to the Global Customer Support team, which provides help on general inquiries, and our Analytics Help Desk, which provides expert support in the most complicated and arcane financial areas. Each team has more than 1,000 employees—and users can chat with them instantly to solve problems or find answers. Customer service isn’t just a catchphrase for us. It’s the whole shebang.
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As a true capitalist, I’ve always believed in the markets’ (rather than central planners’) ability to make efficient selections. In many of our new ventures, we don’t appoint a manager at the beginning. We simply throw everyone interested into the deep end of the pool, as it were, and stand back. It becomes obvious very quickly who the best “swimmers” are. We just watch who people go to for help and advice. And later, when we formalize a management appointment, no one’s ever surprised.
The leverage we gain from employing creative people and letting them do their own thing is incredible. Our open office design encourages innovation, and our flat management structure guarantees a well-functioning meritocracy. Our New York headquarters has thirty floors, but everyone who enters the building, whether they are an employee or a visitor, takes an elevator to the sixth floor, to what we call the Link. That’s where we have snacks and drinks, as well as standing tables where people can gather to chat or hold impromptu meetings. This way, everyone in the company—no matter what unit they’re in—mixes and mingles. That helps information and ideas spread across units—“cross-pollination” in management lingo. So whether someone works in the basement or on the twenty-seventh floor, we all go to six to start and end our day—and very often, for a snack or soup in the middle of the day. Collaboration starts with dialogue. And dialogue depends, in no small part, on design.
Fortunately, for us, others do it differently. Typical company politics elsewhere stifle most free-thinking employees, impede collaboration, and discourage risk taking. The accounting oversight in most corporations prevents trying in a year the diverse creativity we encourage every day. Thank goodness. We’ve got enough competition as it is.
Of course, not everything we try works. One project was our year-and-a-half experiment publishing a monthly Sunday newspaper financial insert, Bloomberg Personal. The initial concept came from our salesforce, which thought large advertisers with an upscale focus would be interested. After listening to a presentation, I signed on immediately. It was a great idea, I thought.
Unfortunately, in the end, it really wasn’t. We had planned on distributing through the most prestigious Sunday newspapers, but could not get many to carry us. (They thought of us as competition for ad sales rather than as a valuable supplement.) The resulting less attractive distribution meant fewer advertisers: We never sold more than one-fifth of the space we had budgeted. Then, when the cost of newsprint almost doubled, ensuring large losses every month, it was obvious we had a problem.
We had a dynamite team of writers, artists, and editors. They tinkered with the insert every issue, but it was hard to improve on something that was excellent from the start. The salespeople gave it all we could ask. Try as they might, we just couldn’t make ends meet.
After eighteen months of overly optimistic ad sales projections and runaway costs, I pulled the plug, converting the concept into a subscription-based product. This would be our second magazine. We had the skills for this format in-house. We kept the title Bloomberg Personal, the creative people, and the salesforce from the Sunday newspaper insert. We just gave the content a different delivery form. It still meshed with our Bloomberg Personal website and our weekly Bloomberg Personal television show (TV stories relate to magazine articles relate to computer data). It still capitalized on our cross-branding policy of naming everything Bloomberg where recognition for any one product spills over onto all others. Contributions from people throughout our company were still incorporated, so we had the very best ideas. Technology we already had in place was still employed, giving us dramatic cost advantages. All vintage synergy. All vintage Bloomberg.
The new magazine was an instant success. We sold more ads for the first 100,000-circulation subscription version than we did for the last 7,000,000-circulation giveaway Sunday newspaper insert. And we went from paying others to distribute our publication to receiving subscription fees that covered our mailing and printing costs. Here a simple change of format saved the project. Generally though, deep pockets and a strong stomach help when trying new things. Few innovations are accepted right away. You must bring changes along slowly, improving them over time, building an audience with persistence and repetition. But with just as much resolve, when you find something not working, after giving it a reasonable time, you’ve got to take a deep breath, bite the bullet, and stop the carnage. The embarrassment of failure can’t be allowed to kill the company.
The day we turned off the insert’s life support, we made sure everyone worked extra late on the new venture, the subscription version of Bloomberg Personal. More important than any publication is our organization; we didn’t want people to feel their jobs were in danger, or that they would be penalized for conceiving of or working on a “failure.” At Bloomberg, all we ask is that they come up with as many new ideas as they can think of (no matter how “crazy”), and do their best on the projects we assign. If a concept is flawed, the blame and pain rest with me. The credit for whatever’s right goes to them.
The success we had with Bloomberg Personal led us to create additional magazines, like Bloomberg Markets—and even to buy one: Businessweek. I’ve never been big on acquisitions. Why buy something when you can build it yourself? But Businessweek was a strong brand with a readership among executives and up-and-comers in a wide variety of industries. It was a great audience for us. Plus, it came cheap. McGraw-Hill put it on the block in the midst of the Great Recession. We bought it, rebranded it as Bloomberg Businessweek, brought it into the digital age, and injected new life into it by tapping into our deep pool of talented reporters and analysts—and of course the Terminal’s wealth of data. It’s been a big success.
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When we bought the radio station, we hired ten or so radio reporters, all with at least a few years’ experience, and gave them new-world tools never seen before. For the first few months, they struggled to become accustomed to our advanced proprietary technology, which in all fairness really didn’t work very well. As usual at Bloomberg, even after installation we were still developing. These reporters were convinced it never would work. “This just isn’t the way radio is done.” “It’s not possible.” “You don’t understand broadcasting.” One reporter even wanted to bring his manual typewriter to work. Today, no one questions our use of such techniques. Is it accepted? Our people act like they reported news this way all their lives. They produce more great minutes of programming per capita than any other group. And, on balance, they get paid more too. They deserve it.
With what we’ve developed, we routinely do things that no one else would attempt even as a demonstration—from financial reporting to weather news. We began separately recording every temperature, every sky condition, every form of precipitation, all possible market moves, all sports scores: the basics of what you need to know in twenty seconds. Then, all day long between stories, a computer automatically checks with the National Weather Service and our Bloomberg Terminal and combined the appropriate prerecorded pieces: “At 3:12 p.m. outside, it’s 50 degrees, cloudy skies with light rain, the Dow’s up 3, and in baseball the Yankees lead the Orioles 6 to 5 in the 3rd.” All this vital but routine information presented without a single person’s involvement. Today, this is routine. Back then, it was revolutionary.
Think about having someone in front of a microphone twentyfour hours a day, seven days a week, in multiple cities where Bloomberg broadcasts, just doing routine stuff. It’s mindless work—and expensive. The new economics of media don’t let you stay in business if all your production is done manually. Nor will the people asked to do trivial tasks survive the boredom in this day and age. Industries other than media figured this out fifty years ago. We get more from each person by reducing the drudgery and enhancing creativity. Then we hire more people since each person now is a greater contributor. Work doesn’t expand to fill capacity—opportunity does!
Eventually, large broadcasters began to do things our way and old-line practitioners felt threatened. “There’s got to be something wrong,” they told me. Why? “I don’t know, that’s just not the way it’s always been done.” (Where had I heard that before?) Technology makes our jobs different but more productive and more interesting. Technology frees us to do more creative work. And it has been an important force for freedom in the world.
Television, for instance, has been a great enabling technology, as powerful as Gutenberg’s press. When television was first invented, politicians and social reformers screamed that the poor could never afford to own the “hardware” and would be denied equal access to ideas and educational opportunities. Well, everybody’s got television today, including on their phones, and it hasn’t exactly raised education levels. But it has proven to have other benefits.
Television brought down the Berlin Wall and, in turn, the whole Soviet Union by broadcasting ideas and pictures from the West that showed a better way to live. TV opened up China. Television has drawn people around the world closer together with pop music, comedy, and drama—and the serious kind of information that Bloomberg provides. Today’s mobile phone technology is doing similar incredible things for society, while also presenting new challenges that society must confront—including increasing levels of partisan isolation and polarization, and all of the attendant difficulties that they produce for democracies, which we see playing out in Washington’s extreme dysfunction.
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Bloomberg was one of the first, if not the first, true multimedia companies. We use every available medium—the Terminal, television, print, radio, telephones, web, social media, podcasts—to deliver useful information to our customers. During Winkler’s twenty-five years as editor-in-chief, Bloomberg became the only news organization to receive every top award in every form of news media, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Emmy for television, and the National Magazine Award. Today, all of our media is overseen by a single editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait. After returning to the company in 2014, I hired John away from running the Economist and put him charge of overseeing all of our news content—no matter what medium delivers it—as well as our research arm, Bloomberg Intelligence. Never before had all of these teams reported up to the same person. By breaking down internal barriers, we’ve been able to make better use of our expertise and enrich the quality of content that we can deliver. The value of clear and direct communication can never be underestimated.
Why use all media forms rather than focus on just one? What business are we in? Some companies declare themselves to be “in radio” or “in television” or “in newspapers,” and so on. We have a greater vision. Bloomberg is in the business of giving its customers the information they need, no matter what that information is, where and when they need it, in whatever form is most appropriate. We don’t shoehorn programs into less-than-optimal presentation formats, or deliver them at inappropriate times and places. With all methods at our disposal, we do better. We give our customers what they need, not just what we have. When there’s a difference between the two, we create or adopt a new medium—we don’t ask our customers to accept less.
At Bloomberg, just as our content is tailored to what’s best for the story, it’s also made for what suits the user best. What’s our customer doing when he or she needs news? Where is he or she? One can’t read print or watch television when taking a shower, jogging in the park, or driving to work. One can’t read a whole in-depth report when one has only two minutes to get caught up. If one’s traveling, one can’t receive local content easily. By having all forms of media, we can focus on utility, not just our own commercial interests.
Most companies pay lip service to multimedia, but few actually deliver. They may make minority investments in each other to get “experience” in the field. But when they buy another firm, they usually run it separately from their own, with separate people, content, culture, and profit centers.
Some find external reasons for why they can’t expand into new communications and technologies. Some blame the laws (prohibiting cross-ownership of TV and newspapers in the same market, or Federal Trade Commission anticompetition restrictions). Some blame the unions. (While there are exceptions, unions are not irrational. If management can make what it wants to work in the union members’ interest, management will get the best possible ally.) Some cite analysts’ demand for short-term results. (Investors generally aren’t that stupid, and management should be worrying about its business, not its stock price. In these cases, the executives have no guts and no vision. They’re afraid to take risks or accept responsibility. “Blame anyone else. I don’t want to screw up before I retire” is the subtext.)
At Bloomberg, we don’t resist multiple cross-product responsibility. We don’t have problems blending short-term performance with long-term growth and development. And so far, we’re not obsolete because the difference between those timid, failing companies and Bloomberg is people—from top to bottom.