It was the ultimate drive-by attack. Someone was out to cut me and my ambitions down to size. I was out in Palo Alto. On the phone with people at NBC, I tried to joke it off, saying I was honored to be thought of as a corporate samurai. But inside I was devastated.
I called a friend who was then the head of the Weber Shandwick PR agency and asked him to check with his sources at the Post to see where the quote had originated. He called back quickly. “I got some bad news. I can’t find out who, but it’s coming from within.”
I had become the enemy. Was it Bob Wright’s PR chief? Somebody on Team Zucker? Zucker himself?
* * *
—
In February 2007, Jeff Zucker took over for Wright, as everyone knew he would. He said the right things about change coming faster than ever, about digital media being the future, but my antenna was up. Soon enough, I received proof that the turf war was still on. In April, a story in the Post said I was “losing credibility” according to half a dozen sources “close to NBC.” One said, “People are beginning to question why she has been given so much responsibility relative to her performance.”
I felt so alone. When the article came out, I was at a GE leadership meeting—a golf outing on Kiawah Island—along with Zucker. Since I don’t play golf, I walked the beach for hours, turning everything over in my head. I felt publicly humiliated and betrayed. And I felt like I was falling off the radar.
Leadership is not for those with weak kidneys. You can’t stay above the fray and still be an effective leader.
I had taken to talking to Zucker only when absolutely necessary and only about our disagreements over digital and cost-cutting. The real solution, I realized later, was to seek out more genuine, more open, more emotional engagement with him to better offer feedback so it’s not seen as criticism. But I didn’t understand yet how powerful that kind of conversation could be, or how necessary it was to have the tools to do it well. I had a lot to learn.
I once worked with a man named Gavin; he really irritated me. He frequently talked over me, he didn’t ask for input before deciding the answers to complex questions outside his realm, and he generally needed to have the last word in everything. I would get anxious heading into meetings with him, fearing that we wouldn’t make much progress. Then one day, I tried a new tactic. I asked myself: What can I learn from Gavin? Instead of being indignant that he didn’t work hard enough and took too much of the credit, I decided to use him as a teacher of how to work differently. I asked myself, What can I learn from him about working smarter, not just doing more work? Cultivating that new perspective helped me, and eventually I forged an imperfect but functional relationship with him. He didn’t change, but I did. There are still people in my life who can irritate me. Instead of seeing them as adversaries, I have learned to change my mind-set, to think of them as potential teachers.
While attending a session in Boston between the Dalai Lama and a group of business leaders, the Dalai Lama said to us, “Your enemy is your best teacher. I lose my temper, yes, but deep anger, no. I’ve learned to look first at the human level. I’m just like you.”
All In?
As the Page Six attacks escalated and my fights with Zucker grew bitter, I thought a lot about loyalty. I felt like I’d been tossed to the wolves—and worse, that Jeff Immelt had done the tossing.
That’s when Steve Jobs called.
At the end of 2005, NBC signed an iTunes try-out deal with Apple under which we sold TV show episodes for $1.99 each, like everyone else (Apple set the price). When I started at NBC we’d already pulled in $2.5 million, a third of that from The Office.
As NBC’s new head of digital, I’d been working with Apple to push more of our digital content to iTunes, and I got to know their team as the relationship grew. I met with Steve’s right-hand man, iTunes VP Eddy Cue. Eddy later approached me about working for him, as a general manager for iTunes. I had also gotten to know Allison Johnson, their head of advertising, and Phil Schiller, their CMO, through my marketing network.
When Steve called me to seal the job offer in November, it came so out of the blue that I couldn’t think of anything to say, except that anyone would be stupid to not consider such a great opportunity. I went to Cupertino as a next step, meeting with a number of people at Apple, culminating with Steve himself.
I was led into Steve’s stark-white conference room next to his office. Steve seemingly materialized out of nowhere in his black mock turtleneck and jeans. He was smaller in person than I expected. Our meeting lasted an hour. We talked a lot about GE’s ad campaigns, about Ecomagination, which he liked a lot, and about NBC and digital content. He didn’t make any specific offers or mention a title other than iTunes management. I realized I was being felt out. It was all very Jedi.
A few days later, he left a message on my cell phone. “This is Steve Jobs. I just wanted to say how much we’d like to have you work for us at Apple. We’re about to make something really big happen. You haven’t seen anything yet,” he said on the message. “If you have any questions, I’m happy to talk to you directly.”
I felt honored and excited, but queasy. Could I just leave NBC? In 2006, Apple wasn’t yet the juggernaut it would soon become with the launch of the iPhone. An inveterate planner, I focused on all the reasons I had for turning Apple down.
The environment seemed very command and control, and I had been trying to get away from that environment at GE/NBC. Allison told me that although Steve was hard to work for, she did her best work there. If you want to be tested and made better, she said, Apple was the place to do that. And that resonated with me.
Yet I was excited about what could happen by merging digital and video. I believed there would be more opportunities in content; I wanted to be a storyteller.
Although I was torn, in the end I said no.
Two months later, I was surprised when my cell phone rang with Steve calling me again. “I understand why you didn’t take that role with iTunes. I get it, it wasn’t big enough for you. But I have an idea for another role. When can you come to see me?” When I told him I had plans to be in San Francisco in two weeks, he suggested that we “take a walk.”
At first, he talked about the concerns on his mind—energy consumption, landfill issues with computer waste, packaging and shipping. Then he asked me to tell him more about what we had done with Ecomagination. He was particularly interested in the advertising that we had done at GE. I talked a lot about our dancing elephant and the imagery. He saw our efforts as imaginative and “bold.”
“I want you to work at Apple. So here’s what I have in mind. You’ll work directly for me. I need someone who can help us get a better handle on the environment. We’re not where we need to be, and I’m committed to doing a much better job on the green front. And I think there are other things you’ll do down the road.”
At home, I spent the weekend obsessing over what to do, driving my husband, Chris, crazy. Chris is a great problem-solver. His easygoing, calming influence is just what’s needed when I overthink things. He simplifies, cutting through my layers of complexity. He listens. Once, when I jokingly called Chris “my therapist,” a woman asked me, intrigued, Really? You married your therapist? He’s not, he’s a journalist turned business operator, someone who is really good at steadily moving things forward. We spent hours at the kitchen table walking through the Apple offer, doing the math on whether we could swing the move to California. Then I stayed up half the night, making worksheets, methodically listing the pros and cons about my role at NBC versus Apple.
By now, I made a long daily commute to New York City from our home in Connecticut, which had been convenient for my GE job. Truthfully, we didn’t love Connecticut. While it was beautiful, there was a coldness, some of my own making as I basically focused on work and family, making little time for more. I had few acquaintances beyond mothers of my daughters’ friends. “I can’t believe none o
f your neighbors brought you a pie to welcome you to the neighborhood,” my mother once remarked. I felt certain if I did get a pie, it would be frozen. (Knowing my mother’s friendly ways, she would have gotten to know everyone in town in the first six months.) I felt guilty seeing how Katie had struggled to adapt as a young teenager to a new school in a new town where relationships are hard to navigate at any age. I worried about uprooting Meredith, who was just starting high school. Meredith told us she would turn “goth” if we moved. I still laugh at that. As if wearing black clothes and thick eyeliner was the worst thing that could happen.
* * *
—
While my relationship with Zucker and the iVillage team was two months deeper in the toilet, I was also nervous about taking an assignment that was so vague. I had been burned by the NBC role, where I had a title and responsibility without accountability. And I wanted to be part of content creation more than technology development—perhaps run a cable network or a consumer digital company.
I called Steve back on Monday. “Steve, you’ve given me a lot to think about. It is exciting,” I said. “But I can’t take the job. I just can’t move my younger daughter right now. It was hard for my older daughter, uprooting her to Connecticut. I vowed not to repeat that.”
I think Steve was surprised, but his tone was very empathetic. “You have to take care of your family first. I understand,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I understand.”
Not long after I turned Steve down, Zucker started to ask if Apple wasn’t getting a better deal with iTunes than they should. “We really should get more for The Office, considering how hot it is,” he said. “We’re making iTunes, not the other way around.” And so, about six months before the contract came up for renewal at the end of 2007, we made it known we wanted a new deal. It quickly escalated into a war, with Jeff Zucker and Eddy Cue sending caustic e-mails to each other, and Jobs stepping in to calm the waters.
Apple refused to budge from its one-size-fits-all pricing. And soon enough, Zucker got so angry that he sent NBC PR to the New York Times to tell them we weren’t renewing the contract. Jobs went ballistic, and for almost a year there was open warfare between NBC and Apple. It was not until September 2008 that NBC and Apple announced that NBC content would be back in the iTunes store.
* * *
—
Later, I felt turning Steve down may have been one of my biggest missed opportunities. Not the money, although it hit me a few times how much I could have made in stock options. The thing that nagged me most was the missed chance to be tested, to grow and be made better. And yet, in my gut, I worried that I might not have thrived in that environment. There may have been too many constraints on my ability to grow and innovate.
There would be a few other times I talked to companies about open roles. I’ve never considered it disloyal to discover new potential paths and understand your worth outside your current company. Usually I’d return with a renewed commitment to the mission, and especially to the team.
CHAPTER 7
FAILING FORWARD: IT TAKES A VILLAGE
Less than a month after I started at NBC, Mark, my head of business development, told me an investment banker had called to say that the women’s community site iVillage was on the block. Although it had been on our radar, I didn’t really have an opinion on the site at first. But the more I looked at it, the more I felt that its community and content could be a strategic value for us if we worked it in with our own women-angled properties, such as Bravo and especially Today.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. Mark called it a “premium-priced fixer-upper.” While it had good sales, it was still a Web 1.0 company, a glorified online magazine. The big upside was what Mark called “the power of NBCU programming meets the passion of community”—that is, we could make our content interactive for a passionate audience that would access it on platforms from laptops to the smartphones that were just starting to appear on the market.
iVillage was led by CEO Doug McCormick, a seasoned salesman who had packaged the site well by emphasizing the community piece that most interested us. It wasn’t a sexy, YouTube kind of property, but it had this incredible community of women. We had intense debates over whether or not we should buy iVillage. I remember sitting in my car in Westport, Connecticut, having a conference call with Bob Wright, Darren Feher, the CTO of NBC, and other members of our team. We were in the final stages of the deal, trying to get a bid in as rumors flew that other media companies were going after it. Darren had just reviewed iVillage’s tech and he wasn’t impressed. “The technology back-end is bad,” he said. Bob asked what I thought. I said the audience is what we wanted and the ad sales would jump-start our digital team. Then I bounced it to Darren, to ask if it could be fixed. “Challenging, but of course, we can fix anything,” he said confidently.
After a pause, Bob’s voice came on the line: “Let’s keep going.”
Jeff Immelt called me after we had pitched the deal, and the heat was on for us to make a formal bid. The price was now $600 million, much higher than our starting point, but by now everyone was in—even Darren. We had reworked the financial plan several times to find a way to get the payback terms that GE needed to fund it. It was a near frenzy of irrational exuberance.
“So you like this deal?” Jeff asked me, “Bob is really hot for it.”
“I like the strategy. It moves us toward the future with community, even if it’s only one step.” I was six weeks into the job, and honestly, I didn’t have enough expertise to make that call yet. But I had trained myself to project an image of preternatural calm at such moments. It was only years later that I learned to trust my doubts, and express them candidly to others.
In the end we did the deal. The competition was rumored to be closing in, and the price kept going up. Bob was the lion in for the kill, News Corporation’s Myspace acquisition taunting him. We were all following close behind, cheering him on.
I dubbed the acquisition the cornerstone to our digital strategy. But the first crack appeared immediately: the iVillage management team left within days of the purchase. I remember feeling particularly peeved at McCormick, who had led such a fierce bidding contest and then couldn’t wait to exit. He left pocketing about $25 million. Why was he in such a hurry?
After watching much of iVillage’s leadership jump ship, our most pressing responsibility was to create an integration team. We quickly chose the head of the Bravo network, Lauren Zalaznick—who worked for NBC programming head Jeff Gaspin—as integration leader and general manager. Lauren had had a spectacular run heading Bravo after NBC acquired it, building on programs like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I thought that, depending on how things went, she could become iVillage CEO.
Lauren’s brilliance at Bravo had been to hone the network as a kind of entertainment boutique, serving a small but hip and affluent audience, exactly the one advertisers wanted. Quirky and creative, Lauren is prone to mocking the very bureaucracy she expertly navigates.
I pushed hard for Gaspin and Zalaznick’s involvement. And in the early days of integration they were excited. Lauren loved her new job, because she got first dibs on our new property. Much of NBC was psyched to help, too. The interactive director of Access Hollywood asked to be included, and Jeff Gralnick of NBC News suggested streamable video by health and science correspondent Robert Bazell, which could then be promoted on Today.
For the first sixty days, the team focused. But as Lauren and Gaspin and other division heads dug into the iVillage integration, staff started to ask why money and attention was being showered on an outside women’s platform when they’d rather create their own—via Bravo, Today, and NBC TV stations. They had their own digital teams. Why weren’t they being given the love?
At meetings, when I’d throw out an idea such as linking the Bravo and iVillage communities, or creating an iVillage women’s health series for Today, Lauren and Gaspin began to imply
that the other pieces of NBC refused to cooperate. “My team is already building one,” Lauren was told, or, “Today is on that already.”
People stopped concentrating on the fact that iVillage had a robust community of engaged women and strong sales that we could all leverage. Instead they focused on all the things that were wrong with it. Lauren complained about the amount of astrology on iVillage. The iVillage audience was America’s heartland, not the hip demographic she was aspiring to reach. And the technology was bad—much worse than we had thought.
In the face of rapid change, people tend to retreat into their silos and guard their own turf. The question was, How was I going to overcome those walls and fiefdoms? How do you get a company to embrace the new?
I could have asked Bob Wright to get more personally involved, but it didn’t seem right. I’d grown a lot since leaving GE—I shouldn’t have to say, “Because the boss said so.” I had been hired to handle this. So I fell back on old habits and tried to go it alone. That’s tempting but also foolish, I would come to find.
Innovation is a social activity. One person’s ideas build on another’s. Someone else reframes it through the eyes of the customer. It’s never clean or linear. To create an innovative team environment, the person leading the effort needs what entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan calls social capital. Social capital is the mortar that connects team members, the feeling of safety and trust that allows people to ask crazy questions and provide slightly less crazy answers without embarrassment, to iterate to greatness. But social capital has to be built, banked, and stored. That means engaging in practices that are antithetical to a world that measures people by how well they meet their numbers. In that environment, asking your employees to make time for more idle chitchat sounds ridiculous.
Imagine It Forward Page 14