Читать книгу Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win - William Taylor - Страница 12

There is an undeniable populist strain to the organizations we’ve encountered thus far. For 35 years, Southwest Airlines has pursued a flight plan to recast the economics of travel and “democratize the skies.” For more than five years, ING Direct has banked on a critique of the worst practices in financial services and vowed to “lead Americans back to savings.” GSD&M’s Roy Spence, an unapologetic Texas progressive, urges clients not just to sell products but to express the “higher calling” of their business.*

But disruptive points of view come in all shapes, sizes, and sentiments. Advocacy is about strategic clarity, not the business world’s version of political correctness. The make-or-break issue isn’t fighting for the little guy. It’s fighting the competitive establishment with insights that challenge its me-too mind-set.

In their no-nonsense competitive manifesto Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win? strategy experts George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer urge executives to stop pussyfooting around with “softball” issues such as corporate governance and stakeholder management and to focus on what matters most in business—“us [ing] every legitimate resource and strategy available to them to gain advantage over their competitors.” Stalk and Lachenauer celebrate tough-as-nails companies that “focus relentlessly on competitive advantage” and “unleash massive and overwhelming force” against vulnerable rivals.9

We admire hard-charging companies too. But we’re convinced, based on the cast of fiercely competitive mavericks we’ve come to know, that the most effective way to play hardball is to build an agenda for growth around a strategic curveball—to prosper as a company by championing fresh ideas about the future of your business. Originality has become the litmus test of strategy.

Nowhere is the power of strategic originality more evident than at the West Coast headquarters of HBO, the powerhouse (and super-profitable) cable network that is the most original force in the numbingly me-too world of mass entertainment. HBO headquarters is anything but a place of populist pretense. The building, near the beach in Santa Monica, is a potent mix of Hollywood power and a laid-back California lifestyle. The eager valet attendants and the phalanx of headset-wearing receptionists provide visitors with a tingle of celebrity. In the cavernous lobby, young actor-writer types fidget on boldly patterned furniture. Gleaming white walls, green glass, and splashes of hot pink give the space a futuristic feel—in sharp contrast to the beige-toned inner sanctum with its views of palm trees, tennis courts, and lush green lawn.

The calm of the executive suite is ruffled only slightly by the daily turmoil of show business. In one corner office, Nancy Lesser, HBO’s high-powered publicist, is finalizing seating arrangements with the producers of the Golden Globes award show for a delegation of celebrities, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, and Mark Wahlberg, who are flying in to attend the gala. (HBO’s programs and stars were nominated for 20 Golden Globes in 2005, more than twice as many as any other network.) Meanwhile, in another corner office, Chris Albrecht, HBO’s chairman and CEO, is finishing a call, headset on, eyes focused intently on the middle distance: “Fifty million?” he asks. “Sixty million? Okay, if it has to be sixty million, it’s sixty million.” Click.

Wrangling for prime seats at an awards show or haggling over big-budget productions comes with the territory in Hollywood. But almost everything else about HBO breaks the mold. Indeed, the company announces its maverick status right at the door. A giant LED display marks the entrance to the lobby. The words on the screen, which run in a continuous loop, may be the most disruptive message in recent television history: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.”

Television—has there ever been an industry that’s so glamorous and so desperate for fresh thinking? This is a business where strategy is based almost entirely on mimicry. Think back to June 1994, when NBC’s Today show unveiled its new-look broadcast from a glass-walled studio in Rockefeller Center. Within a year or two, virtually every morning show had a windowed studio somewhere in New York City. A decade later, when Donald Trump attracted big ratings for NBC with The Apprentice, rival networks raced to sign their own billionaires, from Internet bad boy Mark Cuban (ABC) to British magnate Richard Branson (Fox). And so it goes in the vast wasteland: Survivor begets Big Brother, which begets I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! Or The Osbournes begets The Simple Life, which begets Growing Up Gotti. All of which beget a sense of resignation among viewers and an air of desperation among TV executives: how does anyone win when everyone is playing the same game?

And then there’s HBO. There’s no denying the network’s glittering financial performance over the past decade. With a subscriber base of nearly 28 million households, HBO dwarfs any and all of its pay-cable rivals. Its parent, Time Warner, doesn’t break out detailed financial results for the unit, but Wall Street analysts report the company’s average earnings growth at 20 percent per year since 1995, and estimated profits of $1.1 billion in 2004 (more than any other network, cable or broadcast) on roughly $3.5 billion in revenue. HBO alone has an estimated market value of some $20 billion.

What has truly distinguished HBO is not its profitability but its programming. As anyone within reach of a TV clicker knows, the network shaped the pop-culture conversation of the early 21st century with a trio of hits: Sex and the City (an antic mix of sex, shoes, restaurants, and relationships that ran from 1998 to 2004), The Sopranos (David Chase’s unstintingly original series about an angst-ridden New Jersey mob boss debuted in 1999), and Six Feet Under (the darkly comic chronicles of a dysfunctional family of undertakers from Oscar-winning screenwriter Alan Ball that ran from 2001 to 2005). The “3S’s,” in HBO parlance, drew prime time–sized audiences to a network that reaches only one-quarter of all TV households, planted fear in the hearts of broadcast executives, and won universal acclaim from critics. At the 2004 Emmys, the highpoint of HBO’s hold on pop culture, it received an unprecedented 124 nominations and won 32 awards.

Even with the retirement of two of the three S’s, HBO’s lineup has remained without peer in its invention, emotion, and overall excellence. In addition to its new-generation weekly series (including Entourage and Big Love), HBO has produced a stream of miniseries, made-for-TV movies, and theatrical releases. The network’s $120 million miniseries Band of Brothers (produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg) premiered on September 9, 2001, and drew a total audience of nearly 59 million people in the weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The network has committed more than $300 million to two more mega-projects: Tom Hanks’s series about John Adams and a Pacific war series from Band of Brothers producers Spielberg and Hanks. Meanwhile, HBO’s much-acclaimed documentary group, run since 1979 by Sheila Nevins, has won 15 Oscars, 81 Emmys, and 25 Peabody Awards.*

HBO’s track record isn’t just a matter of commissioning smarter scripts or landing better actors than its rivals. It’s rooted in a distinctive point of view about how to create value in the entertainment business—the strangely disruptive proposition that quality and originality, not mediocrity and mimicry, drive long-term prosperity. With HBO, what you see on the screen reflects what the company stands for in the marketplace—ideas that reset the expectations of the viewing audience and set the network apart from decades of conventional wisdom in New York and Hollywood.10

Technically speaking, of course, HBO and the networks are not competitors. HBO sells itself to viewers; the networks sell their viewers to advertisers. But broadcast networks, pay channels, and basic cable are all clamoring for attention in an increasingly cluttered, competitive, and fragmented entertainment marketplace. In a business where originality is often viewed as a risk rather than an asset, HBO’s ability to connect with a big audience, elevate its expectations, and keep pushing cultural boundaries is more than a breakthrough for the network. It changes the game for everyone.

“The name of the game [at the broadcast networks] is whatever gets the largest number of people to watch,” says Alan Ball, a self-described refugee from the network TV “gulag” and the creator of Six Feet Under. “What is that? It’s a car wreck. It’s Fear Factor. It’s getting Playboy playmates to eat sheep’s eyeballs. They’re proud of that! ‘Look at the numbers we got! Supermodels puked on each other and people tuned in!’”

Talk to HBO executives about how they evaluate programming and they almost never mention target demographics or overnight ratings. (And they have never raved about sheep’s eyeballs.) “We ask ourselves, ‘Is it different? Is it distinctive? Is it good?’” explains Chris Albrecht, who left the network in 2007, after a 22-year run. “Ultimately, we ask ourselves, ‘Is it about something?’ By ‘about something’ I mean not just the subject, or the arena, or the location, but really about something that is deeply relevant to the human experience. The Sopranos isn’t about a mob boss on Prozac. It’s about a man searching for the meaning of his life. Six Feet Under isn’t about a family of undertakers so much as it is about a group of people who have to deal with their feelings about death in order to get on with their own lives. The next question is, ‘Is it the very best realization of that idea? Is it true to itself?’”

The truth about HBO is that it took years to hone its competitive strategy and programming formula—and honing the strategy required making an explicit decision to reject the business assumptions and performance metrics that guide traditional TV executives. The network, which began life in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1972 as a pay channel that featured boxing, theatrical films, and stand-up comedy, had experimented with a touch of original programming from early on. Some of it was truly memorable, like Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau’s campaign mockumentary Tanner ’88. Some of it was downright horrible: the first “original program” on HBO was actually a polka festival special.

The strategic inflection point came in 1995. After a decade of holding different leadership posts at HBO, Chris Albrecht became president of original programming while Jeff Bewkes took over as HBO’s boss. (Bewkes is now president and COO of Time Warner Inc. Albrecht has run HBO since mid-2002.) At that time, HBO’s original programming was confined to two half-hour comedies, Dream On and The Larry Sanders Show, which the network touted as “the best hour of comedy on television.” (Company insiders joked that they should have called it “the only hour on HBO.”)

Albrecht and Bewkes convened the network’s executive committee and key original programming executives. The question before the group: are we who we say we are? The answer came back: not really. “The words we always used to talk about ourselves were ‘different,’ ‘worth paying for,’ ‘better,’” says Albrecht. “In that meeting, we came to the conclusion that we weren’t quite there yet, but that it was a great thing to strive for. The only way to move forward and win is to take chances and to be distinctive.”

At HBO, “distinctive” had meant “not on network TV.” At the 1995 meeting, says Bewkes, the leadership team chose to “jump fully off this cliff.” It was a big leap. The unit didn’t have hoards of cash to invest in programming, and there was no way to measure return on investment for any particular show. “It was a real mess,” he recalls. “But we just said, ‘Forget about it—let’s just do good stuff and we’ll solve it later.’ We decided to take the high road.” As it turns out, taking that road led to a decade of artistic creativity and financial prosperity unlike anything in television history.

Of course, even the high road has its share of potholes and detours. Success on the scale of HBO invariably gives rise to recrimination, imitation, and pressures for duplication—obstacles that confront successful mavericks in any industry.* During our final visit to HBO’s West Coast headquarters, you could sense the pop-culture conversation shifting. Critics who couldn’t stop celebrating HBO were beginning to castigate the network: Is there life after Six Feet Under? What’s the offspring to Sex and the City?

Albrecht and his colleagues openly acknowledge the perils of success, and that is why they have been engaged in an ongoing strategic conversation to define the future—a future that remains rooted in the network’s core mission (“It’s not TV. It’s HBO”) while moving it in new directions. They are determined to reproduce their business results without repeating themselves in the marketplace.

“We’re very aware that the biggest hurdle to our success is our own success,” Albrecht says. “Are we ever going to get 124 Emmy nominations again? Not going to happen. That’s fine, so long as we keep challenging our own thinking. We hear the questions: How are you going to follow The Sopranos? What are you going to do after Sex and the City? Those are the wrong questions! We don’t think about staying where we are, and we don’t worry about topping ourselves. ‘TV’ is a finite idea. ‘It’s not TV’ is an infinite idea. Our little slogan is taking on a whole new meaning. Before, it was a kind of rebel yell. Now it’s an organizing principle for our strategy, which is to not limit ourselves by the idea of TV.”

One way to move beyond TV is to move from the small screen to the big screen. HBO is positioning itself to shape the market for great independent films, much as it shaped great TV fare. The network’s recent slate includes the award-winning The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Lackawanna Blues and Elizabeth I, the Emmy-winning miniseries starring Helen Mirren, along with theatrical releases such as the singular American Splendor, the wrenching Maria Full of Grace, the documentary Spellbound, and Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. In September 2004 the Los Angeles Times surveyed HBO’s offerings and concluded, “There’s new hope for maverick movies, and, in an odd twist, it’s coming not from some new studio or well-heeled cineaste but from TV.” In May 2005 HBO formed a joint venture with New Line Cinema, called Picture-house, to distribute eight to ten films a year.

Colin Callender, president of HBO Films, recalls that when he and Chris Albrecht took over film production in 1999, “we looked at the landscape and said, ‘Everyone is copying us.’ The cable movie, which we invented, was a genre everyone is doing. So we need to reinvent what we’re doing. We had started making movies that filled a gap in the television landscape, and now we saw a massive gap within the moviemaking landscape. No one was making sophisticated, intelligent, entertaining, grown-up movies anymore. So we now look at HBO movies as filling that gap.”

Ultimately, Chris Albrecht argues, the opportunity to maintain the competitive gap with imitation-minded rivals is as much about computer programming as original programming. The new game isn’t merely to create new shows but to find new ways to package and deliver shows in the emerging digital landscape of mobile, personal, disaggregated entertainment choices—a landscape shaped by TiVo, the iPod, and other disruptive technologies that keep much of the TV establishment awake at night, even as they delight the audience.

“Some traditional companies may view these changes as the enemy,” he explains. “We view them as our friend. This new wave of technology plays to our strengths. We got to where we are by riding a new technology with a product that was compelling, groundbreaking, and game-changing. The cable industry was built on the back of HBO. Now we get to do it again.”

So it goes for companies that compete on the originality of their ideas. It’s not enough for leaders to challenge the prevailing logic of their business; they also have to rethink the logic of their own success. Sure, HBO executives would love to introduce another pop-culture TV phenomenon like Sex and the City. But they’re not going to invent the network’s future by trying to replay its past. Their plan is to take the phrase “it’s not TV” literally—to make shows available on a wide range of devices, in all kinds of settings, 24 hours a day. That’s why HBO has pushed ahead with subscription video on demand (viewers in about 8 million households can now watch HBO programs at whatever time they choose), and why it has set in motion a range of other content-delivery experiments.

“We have to be more aggressive and take bigger risks than before,” Albrecht says. “We’re actively looking for new cliffs to jump off. We’re doing things nobody else will do, because they can’t chase us into those spaces. We didn’t get here by playing by the rules of the game. We got here by setting the rules of the game.”