The One-Guy Theory

Diffuse power begets confusion. Companies led by one guy get things done

Pietari Posti

There is a central truth about Time Warner (TWX) that new CEO Jeff Bewkes must grapple with: Things. Move. Very. Slowly. There. The stock market yawned after his initial earnings call with analysts on Feb.6, perhaps because two of the major initiatives he mentioned—revamping AOL to sell its dial-up access business more easily and moving toward some decision about Time Warner Cable (TWC)—already have spent a few seasons percolating as possibilities in the press. Furthermore, readying AOL would be "fairly complicated," Bewkes warned. The process could take several months.

This touches on the fundamental media conglomerate problem: There are too many layers. There are too many fiefdoms. There are too many...guys. Guys strolling the corridors, guys clustering around the boardroom, guys slowing things down. (The litany of executives that follows shows they're, still, almost exclusively guys.) This, in a time of great uncertainty and fast-shifting consumer appetites, when sheer speed may determine which companies successfully molt and which simply melt.

I was chewing this over with a dealmaker pal and, inevitably, the alacrity and decisiveness with which News Corp. (NWS) makes its moves came up. Said pal had a two-word explanation: "One guy."

Meaning, at News Corp., Rupert Murdoch is the one guy who sets the parameters, who makes the decisions, and whose sensibility is stamped onto the brains of underlings. A producer on, say, Fox News, for good or ill, thinks about what Murdoch wants out of the programming a hell of a lot more than a producer for Time Warner's CNN thinks about Bewkes.

Permit me to introduce the One-Guy theory of media companies. A One-Guy company, to a remarkable degree, has one guy clearly in charge and setting the tone of the organization. Working at a truly One-Guy kind of place concentrates the mind wonderfully, as anyone who worked for ur-One-Guy guy Barry Diller will tell you.

But Time Warner, famously set up as a group of decentralized divisions, is no such place. All earlier attempts to make it more, um, One-Guy have flopped resoundingly. This is bad, because practically all of media's recent forward-looking moves came courtesy of One-Guy guys. Which companies are making sudden knockout bids for laggard companies? One-Guy players News Corp. for Dow Jones and Microsoft (MSFT) (former One-Guy Bill Gates; current One-Guy Steve Ballmer) for Yahoo! (YHOO) Which broadcast network has made the boldest moves online? CBS (CBS), dominated by the One-Guy personality of Leslie Moonves. He likely learned a thing or two from his years working for Sumner Redstone, an exemplar of the form and One-Guy enough to have fired Viacom (VIA) CEO Tom Freston abruptly for, well, not being One-Guy enough, and letting a One-Guy company snatch up MySpace (NWS). (NBC, its Many-Guys status solid thanks to being submerged within General Electric (GE), is making a bid to reinvent the online video space with its still-upcoming Hulu.com. But it had to partner with Murdoch's News Corp. to do it.)

ALPHA BETS

One of the sharpest recent moves from newspapers—now there's a phrase you don't encounter often!—is the complex, 22-company deal with Yahoo to partner on various local online ventures. (Some proponents of that partnership expect it to start producing meaningful revenue this year.) A key player in knitting together the alliances: W. Dean Singleton, chieftain of the privately held Media-News Group and a rare modern-day One-Guy newspaper exec.