As I watched Jason struggle, fight, and, more often than not, win, I was beginning to formalize my ideas about challengers, especially new brands, as one of the most effective mechanisms to drive rapid change.
Hulu finally launched in beta in October 2007, and then for real several months later. I remember the first time Jason showed us the demo. The design was simple, elegant, beautiful. He walked me through the user experience, explaining the intuitive features they had put in place. He explained the back-end development and the data they were collecting about the user. Every decision was made to support a great experience for the user. It was the living example of what I had failed to convey in my time at iVillage. This was the gold standard.
It seemed that the rest of the world—and most important, users—agreed. The site was simple, elegant, and minimalistic—exactly what nobody expected from an online video service parented by two media giants. The viewing window for watching video online was a third bigger than previous services, the image resolution was true TV quality, and the interface was totally uncluttered—easy enough for Jason’s mom to use. Even the tech-world intelligentsia who had mocked it as ClownCo were forced to offer their respect (“[B]oy did [Jason Kilar] make me eat crow—a well charred crow on top of that,” Om Malik later wrote on GigaOm).
The investor world gave Hulu its stamp of approval as well. In October 2007, at the time of the beta launch, private equity heavyweight Providence Equity Partners invested $100 million for a 10 percent stake. This was important, because it would keep Fox and NBC honest; our coinvestor would want for Hulu to succeed as the future of TV, not as a way to protect our media butts. Outside money also served to validate the model.
A month after the site went fully live in March 2008, it ranked tenth on the Internet for streaming video. In 2009, it made $120 million; by 2012, it had three million subscribers and $695 million in revenue. Even better, for data-obsessed people like myself, was the information Hulu gave NBC and Fox. Hulu only showed a quarter of the ads that viewers were forced to sit through on TV, but we had demographic information on each viewer for each show, gathered when they registered for the service. And viewers provided feedback on ads, which allowed us to more precisely target them. No more Geritol ads for twenty-five-year-olds—precisely what advertisers wanted and were willing to pay for.
NBCU digital revenues jumped past $1 billion in 2009, more than double the digital revenue in 2006. NBCU’s combined web properties, such as NBC.com, CNBC.com, and MSNBC.com, went from being a top one hundred destination in 2006 to a top ten destination by 2009. We launched the Peacock Equity Fund and put down almost $100 million in early-stage investments in digital media companies. We even took Peacock to successful exits, with the sale of Adify to Cox and Bigpoint games to GMT.
Hulu was, for me, a validation of my approach to marketing. Jason showed how entrepreneurs have to think outside in, but always with the user as their North Star. The user and her “unmet needs” was at the center of everything Jason did. He took a discovery-based mode of inquiry that starts with questions that look beyond the current reality: What if there was a place where all the high-quality premium TV and movies could be watched? Whenever and wherever people wished? And in HD quality? And in a video player that was elegant and clutter-free?
How might we…? These are the questions that change-makers must ask, and continue asking.
In the years after Hulu became a success, Jason still found himself the target of attacks from the media giants who owned Hulu. The tension came to a climax in February 2011, when Jason posted one of the most controversial memos in media history on the Hulu blog. The memo was ostensibly meant to announce that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were returning to Hulu. But after spending a few words on that, Jason doubled down on a deeply felt and, sadly, a professionally reckless manifesto about what was wrong with TV.
Jason didn’t mention the three broadcast partners that owned Hulu, but he didn’t have to. His memo was a two-thousand-word indictment calling them doomed Luddites and nitwits. How did he say that? By saying that traditional TV has too many ads that angered consumers and charged advertisers for nothing, whereas Hulu’s sparse ads were twice as effective? Check. That consumers want TV to be more convenient and not scheduled as it is in broadcast? Check. That consumers decide what gets renewed and what dies via responses on social media, and content creators have to listen? Check.
Eventually Netflix and Amazon would get this right, and become scaled disrupters to the television networks. Hulu could have been the broadcasters’ (or cablecasters’) answer to Netflix, if they could get out of their own way. Eventually, they still might do this. In Walt Disney’s 2017 proposed takeover of 21st Century Fox, Hulu was seen as a factor for survivability in a digital age.
By early 2013, Jason was gone. He cashed out for a reported $40 million. He’d fought long and hard, and created a great product, against everyone’s expectation.
Battling for Yes with Dr. No
Like everything involving change, you have to keep working it. Frustrating as it may be. Like Jason, I was always at war with some version of “Dr. No.” You know Dr. No—they are everywhere (maybe you’ve even been one)—and they stand as a particularly malignant example of staff resistance. It’s like they have a PhD in saying no; no is the answer to everything. “We’ve tried that before.” “The customer won’t like it.” “We can’t do that.”
And too often, I allowed a Dr. No to be my foil. In addition to digital, I also oversaw the NBC Universal teams selling television advertising—this represented over $6 billion annually and was core revenue for NBC Universal. Brand marketers—the CMOs of our ad clients—were expressing concern about television media because marketers weren’t able to get the data insights they needed from us. They wanted to know more about the viewer than they could get on their own, and they were willing to pay more for it. (Money that in later years, Facebook and Google would commandeer.)
I had all kinds of ideas for driving change in ad sales, and enthusiastically created one of media’s first branded content studios and expanded our segmentation of target customers by interests—wellness, environment, women’s issues, pets—beyond what we’d done for decades by selling a daypart (i.e., late night) or a traditional demographic (i.e., women 25–54); and I tried in vain to develop a data-driven viewer loyalty program. Along this path, one Dr. No drove me especially crazy.
She was a hard-charging sales department head. Influential and outspoken, she made it clear that no one messed with her. She oversaw sales for important dayparts—meaning big revenue—and had been at NBC for what counted as forever. Whenever the marketing or digital teams suggested something vaguely different, she’d say, “No, that won’t work.” Or she’d trot out the name of a big buying agency: “I just talked to Julie of Zenith Media, and she doesn’t think this is a good idea.” She was an immovable force. No matter what it was—a digital banner ad, video pre-roll in digital video, branded content—the judgment was always the same. Always brutal. Few people would challenge her.
I tried, or so I thought. I set up meetings with her, sometimes with her boss (who reported to me) to try to “educate” her on the new trends in media marketing. I brought in clients so we could hear from them together. But she wouldn’t budge; and I got more frustrated. I’m not proud of it, but ultimately I just started working things on my own. I essentially gave up on Dr. No, and went rogue. I was determined to “show” her how it was done. And while I had some success—forging broader relationships with key clients like P&G and GlaxoSmithKline; landing a first-of-its-kind $30MM branded content deal with American Express and launching innovation testbeds with several media agencies—I essentially had given up on the organization by doing these things alone.
A change-making colleague described Dr. No with ruthless clarity: “You know, she is like a cancer. She just infects everything with her attitude.”
Sometimes an ov
erly resistant Dr. No must leave. But getting rid of Dr. No isn’t always possible, or wise. Nor would the NBC system have let me fire her—she had deep expertise, grew good client relationships, and brought in revenue. I should have worked harder at amplifying the ideas of other change-makers already in the sales organization, not just battle the human barrier wall. When you create a surround-sound of change, those resistant usually adapt. I could have been more candid and patient with Dr. No, instead of giving up on her. Distrustful people, I find, end up isolating themselves and alienating others.
Today, the media landscape is closer to what I was pushing to build back then. Media companies now have in-house creative agencies and branded-content studios, and streaming video services have scaled. I was gone from NBC long before media started to change the way it engaged with audiences and advertisers, long before Hulu became a household name.
Some of the conflict I experienced at NBC came because people were threatened by change or my fervor in driving it, and some came from my avoidance of conflict with people. That’s clear to me now. My relationship with Jeff Zucker never improved. He barely tolerated me, and I him. Until he didn’t have to any longer.
In 2008, I got a call from Jeff Immelt during one of my regular “check-ins” with him. “What do you think about coming back to GE?” he said.
I’d not really thought about it, I told him. I figured I’d keep working at NBC and eventually take over one of the networks. “Things are starting to take root here,” I said.
“We need you back at GE,” Jeff said, after a pause. “We need a bigger push in marketing and sales.”
It was not a request. I never knew if Immelt prompted my move or Zucker did. At first, I didn’t know how I felt about that. I realized that when Immelt sent me to NBC, he had suspected the mix of a dysfunctional culture, outside disruption, and my lack of a power base would make my job incredibly difficult. Now, being called back when I was, I felt somewhat betrayed. I had wanted Jeff to stand up for me through the NBC attacks and conflict so that I could achieve the kind of large-scale success I so dearly wanted and fought for. But I couldn’t really blame him for not diving into that shark-filled pool. That wasn’t his job, nor as it turns out, was it mine.
On my last day at NBC, Marc in HR organized a midafternoon reception with the leadership team. We had the standard sickly-sweet cake and champagne. Zucker came in, raised a glass. He comments were brief. “Beth, thank you and good luck.”
I looked at the small group of executives assembled and said, “Thank you. I’ve learned so much from all of you. Everyone should be as fortunate as you, to be as passionate about the work you do.” I meant it. Their passion for their livelihood, for the industry, meant everything to them. But I knew it also held them back.
Jeff Immelt later told me that my time at NBC was the closest he had ever come to firing me. It was, he said, the only time that I had lost my skill at flying above the fray. Instead, I had dived into it. And he was right. I had jumped down from the balcony into the mosh pit, losing my perspective.
As a change-maker, you will have your share of failures. It’s the nature of the job. The important thing is to learn from them. I had learned, painfully, the importance of confronting and not running away from conflict. I had discovered the importance of co-opting the resisters. I learned the importance of never giving up and constantly moving forward. Of creating a challenger brand to help drive change throughout the organization.
Challenges
HANDLING CONFLICT
When you find yourself getting irritated, here are some tactics I’ve learned that can transform a challenging situation into a learning experience.
Learn to recognize when you’re getting irritated in the first place. In poker, everybody has tells, little quirks of gesture and voice that reveal when we’re bluffing. (Me? Disgusted look on my face—gives me away every time!) The same is true of anger and frustration.
1. Learn what your tells are (your colleagues are probably better at this than you are, so consider asking a few you trust). Recognize when they’re happening.
2. If you don’t know why you’re irritated, then ask yourself “when.” When did your irritation arise? Did somebody say something? Was it an e-mail that came in? Something you saw or read? Is your irritation future-focused or about something that has already happened? Is it about a person? Is it irritation directed at yourself?
That last question is particularly useful, in my experience. Often, when we’re frustrated, it’s because we didn’t seize an opportunity to speak up and disagree, ask a question, or propose an alternative. Sometimes anger and irritation can be jealousy in disguise. The other person is less important than your reaction to them.
TOWARD INNOVATION, OR HOW TO UN-GRINF*CK A TEAM
Make the work about learning, not just performance. I should have framed iVillage as a way to learn how this new thing, digital media, might be successful, and told everyone that their ideas were vital. It could have become our digital learning lab, instead of “the cornerstone of our digital strategy.” We needed an atmosphere of intellectual and creative interdependence, not one based on hitting the numbers. We would have been wise to confront the fairy-tale nature of our business plan up front. Unrealistic financial projections are common in new ventures, in an effort to justify a return.
Admit you’re not perfect. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Express your doubts. It takes a confident leader to admit what she doesn’t know. That is how you get buy-in from the rest of the team.
Ask a lot of questions. By asking team members questions, you force them to formulate and own their ideas. Never dismiss or mock an idea, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. Patients die and planes crash when team members sit on problems because they are afraid of being belittled.
Ideas trump hierarchy. Show your distain for groupthink. Embrace divergent viewpoints, especially from junior members. Look at Israel, where there’s a miraculously vibrant and innovative start-up culture. Entrepreneurs there get their formative leadership training in the country’s compulsory military service, in which the country’s rabid antihierarchical ethos encourages even a private to question a general if he identifies a weakness or believes he has a better tactical solution. In some of the executive courses on innovation that I’ve helped create at GE, I insist participants visit Israel. They stare with disbelief at the raucous free-for-all that passes for a typical business meeting there, as the CEO is invariably probed and challenged on every declaration. It is an incredibly vivid example of psychological safety.
Confront, but don’t make it personal. Resist the urge to become defensive or, worse, attack the person critiquing your idea. Work to build social capital through informal conversations and activities. Reinforce the fact that you work for the same team and that your success is a function of your interdependence. Creating an atmosphere of psychological safety means creating an environment that can be demanding and argumentative. People fight out of passion. That’s why it is worth the fight.
COULDA SHOULDA WOULDA
The French have a great phrase: l’esprit de l’escalier, which translates to “staircase wit.” In other words, thinking of the perfect reply when you’re already on the staircase heading out the door. I suffer from it chronically.
If you’re a worrier (like me), you can drive yourself crazy replaying the things you should have said, but didn’t. As much as I think on my feet, I am always so much more brilliant in my mind after the fact. But life is not a Hollywood movie. We rarely get a do-over. And you don’t want to be that person who sends awkward e-mails or asks for a follow-up to explain yourself.
Here’s a simple practice that I find helpful. I jot down the conversation in my notebook, as well as what I wish I’d said. I draw two lines down the middle of a blank page. I label column one What He/She Said; column two What I Said, and column three What I Wish I’d Said. It allows me to
stop obsessing over it by getting it out of my head and on paper. And it serves as a reference for the next time. It’s also often a good reminder that what I said wasn’t so bad after all!
HAVING DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS
“Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits,” British historian and philosopher Theodore Zeldin says. “Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.”
That is why constantly talking with colleagues and, even more so, detractors is so vitally important. Here are a few tricks I’ve learned over the years to conduct those difficult conversations, and to co-opt those with whom you don’t necessarily have a positive relationship, in order to turn conflict into momentum.
1. Keep the opposition close. It’s vital to do things like have coffee with the person most dedicated to seeing you fail. I should have sat down for coffee with Jeff Zucker—often.
2. Ask your opponents to articulate their vision for success. I didn’t ask Zucker several vital questions about NBC and digital: What are your goals? What does success look like to you?
3. Be candid. Turn conflict into the basis for an alliance.
BUILDING TEAM TRUST
I have a rule: No team outings that involve bathing suits. I was once scarred by an early-career outing that involved bathing suits and team races with rubber chickens between our legs. Let’s just leave it at that.
Trust can’t be coerced. It is earned, one action at a time. Being vulnerable (and not in a Speedo) is a good way to set the tone: Admit what you don’t know. Ask for help. Tell a story of adversity. Share a good laugh at your own expense.
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