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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Media moguls find life much rosier in the unemployment line. Plus: The Golden Globes at a safe distance.
Jan 23, 2003 | In the media ocean of New York a lot of whales have been beached or harpooned lately. At AOL Time Warner, CNN, MCA Records, Sony Music and Random House, the big fish have all been flayed and filleted. It's the most impressive haul since last summer when Vivendi's Jean-Marie Messier, Bertelsmann's Thomas Middelhoff and AOL's Robert Pittman got the hook, and it may not be over yet.
Most of the latest batch have been happy to go, even when pushed. The secret back story of American business in the last two years, even before 9/11 and the corporate scandals, is how heartily all the big boys in the executive suites have hated their lives. Being a player, it seems, turned out to be too much work. The great Viagra days of the '90s -- buying another player's company over a round of golf as yours was about to detumesce -- are history. What's required now isn't Big Deals, it's Process. The headache of sweaty, detail-clogged, discussion-laden days and hours trying to make unwieldy behemoths jammed together in a blaze of publicity actually work. And if corporate largesse has already made you rich, who needs the aggravation?
That's why Elba is crowded with exiled Napoleons these days, and that's why most of them think it's a vacation paradise.
This is the interesting paradigm of 2003. Everyone who has a top job is envious of the ones who don't. The big bucks, even where they haven't evaporated, are not worth the pain of crawling home every night with a head splitting from bottom-line hysteria, vengeful shareholders, treacherous accountants, whining employees and all the stressed-out hours sitting with the corporate "public affairs specialist" spinning, spinning, spinning the circling vultures of the press.
The psychology behind the timing of all the recent turmoil is pretty obvious. When CEOs go off for the year-end break, an orgy of self-pity sets in. They "rediscover" family life, which means that their spouse has finally got into their face for a concentrated period of time and yelled that they aren't going to take it anymore. Plus, there is nothing like slowly riding up a mountain in a chairlift at Aspen or floating on a large boat in the Bahamas to make a big executive feel the harsh unfairness of his plight the other 50 weeks of the year.
This phenomenon is as true of the CEOs who don't quit. When my husband went to Men's Week at the top California spa a few years ago he was struck by how many CEOs being pummeled on the massage slab were ruminating about whom they were going to fire when they got back. "I gotta get rid of the son of a bitch who's supposed to be running my company. Jesus, he even calls me here."
It's rather pleasing to think that in the course of making working life unbearable for everyone else with their mad, unwieldy mergers, top executives have also made it unbearable for themselves.
AOL's ousted chairman Steve Case was asked if he wouldn't be bored sitting around on his 28,000-acre pineapple farm in Hawaii with no job rather than running a communications empire. He replied, "Hawaii doesn't sound that bad to me." You bet. The new aristocracy are the Severance Kings, wrapped in their payoffs and free at last.
