Can I Get a Pink Slip?

At the end of the day there is simply nothing more stunning about the Conan-Leno-NBC meltdown than this: Jeff Zucker still has a job.

Zucker-bashing has been a tried-and-true sport among entertainment reporters, business analysts, and Hollywood insiders for years. No one, the storyline goes, has done so much to destroy something so valuable and been rewarded so handsomely in the process. I won’t pile on lest I get a nosebleed on the way up….

But at the risk of further angering the guy who works for GE Medical in the UK who recently took exception with some of my thoughts about the Comcast-NBC deal and suggested I ought not write about things I don’t understand (because surely the business geniuses who have led GE’s stock price to decline by 2/3 since they took over do have valuable thoughts), I plunge ahead.

Having worked at NBC for 11 years and having been part of one of the many many waves of staff cuts I can’t help but admire Conan for doing the right thing and taking the high road — for the most part. Leno’s been shit on by the peacock more times than he can count but he’s grinned and beared it. Not Conan.

Conan tore into NBC brass in his hilarious Monday night monologue and then released a statement Tuesday in which he said he wouldn’t go along with the network’s embarrassing about-face. Whether it really has to do with his not wanting to participate in the “destruction” of a storied show (dude, it’s a TV show not the Magna Carta) is beside the point. He’s doing what thousands of former NBC staffers wish they could have done.

To be fair,  as Conan said in his statement, I have nothing to complain about. NBC paid me very well for a long time to do a job that I loved so much it didn’t really seem like work. It’s all the people who don’t have Conan’s stature — the legions of behind-the-scenes people who have been treated even more shabbily than the red-haired goofball — that are cheering him on. Television has always been a nasty business filled with mercurial egocentric madmen (and madwomen) but Jeff Zucker’s tenure sets a new standard for passive-aggressive slash-and-burn business demolition.

Conan is simply speaking truth to that misused power. Sadly, however, if he does leave NBC he will end up solving one of Zucker’s big problems. NBC can’t really use four (let’s not forget Carson Daly!) late night hosts and Conan has arguably shown the least promise. How ironic that Conan could help Zucker partially fix the mess of Zucker’s own making. Let’s not forget this total devaluation of a prized and profitable piece of TV real estate began back in 2004 when the fair-haired CEO convinced his boss, GE chief Jeff Immelt, that instead of fixing what was broke (no new hits in primetime during Zucker’s entire tenure) he needed to fix what wasn’t: late night. But then who’s gonna argue with the smartest guy in the room?

I’ll never forget the “town hall” meeting in 2008 in which the head of the “Local Media Division” (the then-new name for what used to be a collection of the most profitable local TV stations in America), John Wallace, waxed poetic about how he was outsmarting the competition by following the “Blue Ocean Strategy”. I chuckled under my breath. I knew the book.

Many of the people who then worked at WNBC gathered in the legendary Studio 6B where Jack Paar had invented “The Tonight Show” and where Channel 4 had broadcast the local news for three decades. We had been called together to hear about the big changes coming to our station and others across the division. At the time Wallace had been in charge for nine months but had made almost no appearances at the stations so this was his big coming out. Unfortunately there was no way for him to sugar coat the decisions he had made up in his office suite on the 52nd floor.

Wallace talked about how the business was changing — people were watching less broadcast TV, ad revenues were falling, and the high costs had to come down. What to do? Wallace said NBC needed to leave the red ocean and sail into a blue ocean — shorthand for a hot-at-the-time economic theory propagated by two economists who got a lot of space in the influential Harvard Business Review before compiling their new economic dreamscape in a best-selling book released in 2005. Their bottom line was relatively simple: leave the “red ocean” of battling known competitors in existing markets and sail to the “blue ocean” of unknown markets where competition is scarce or non-existent. Best of all a company can radically cut costs but still maintain big profits. Sounds good, no?

At NBC that meant giving up competing in the broadcast television space at the local level and instead repositioning as a “content provider” across numerous “platforms”. New websites! New workflows! Video screens on the PATH train! Monitors at gas pumps! And, oh yeah, half the staff. It’s worked out pretty well if going from the #1 brand to irrelevant was the goal.

I tell this story because Wallace is a favorite of Zucker. The “we’re-smarter-than-everybody-else” attitude is pervasive in the network’s executive suites. No matter that the authors of the Blue Ocean Strategy have been unable to show a single company that followed the plan and was successful. That the idea you could radically cut costs by giving up on a known business and still be just as profitable in an unknown (and perhaps non-existent) business sure sounded good in the boardroom!

The late-night fiasco is more of the same. Don’t compete at 10pm with ABC and CBS. Just give up and set sail for the blue ocean. Unfortunately there is no blue ocean in primetime. Just a blood-red ocean filled with giant icebergs — the sea in which the once proud and impregnable Titanic of broadcasting floats, dead in the water, and listing heavily. Yet the captain and his corporate masters act like he’s a genius. Please let me fail like that in a future life!