Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win. William Taylor

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ