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Autumn
of the Moguls by Michael Wolff Rating: • (Read only
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Vacuous If
you’re a regular reader of Michael Wolff’s “This Media Life” column in New York Magazine, you already know
what’s in his new book. Autumn of
the Moguls. If you don’t read that column, your interest in the media
probably isn’t large enough to lead you to bother reading this book. Anyway,
here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 10, “Not Getting It,” (pp. 92-96): My
problem, my analytic failure, is in always thinking this is the end That it
must be the end. That it has to be obvious to everyone that this is the end.
That we have reached the point at which reformation must begin. That the
moral of the story is clear. By
July 2002, there was the absolute logical certainty that AOL Time Warner, the
largest company in the media business, among the largest companies in the
world, could not survive. The collapse of Vivendi
was nearly a fait accompli. Bertelsmann was in deep retreat, they would
surely sell Random House, its vast over-the-top acquisition (again, that
problem of foreigners and due diligence)1 if only
there were a buyer. Disney had become one of those isolated nation - If
I had briefly thought Heilemann and Battelle had an extraordinary opportunity—a chance to
seize an antibehemoth Zeitgeist—now I began to think,
Who would even come to a media
conference? Who would want to?
The media was dead—everybody knew. Must know. And
yet, certainly I was the shortsighted one. When
you listen to the journalists and analysts covering the media business, you
can actually think it’s an orderly. self-correcting
world we work in. Reporters might spend a day ripping Messier or Pittman or Middelhoff to shreds, but then, shortly. return to defending Vivendi or
AOL Time Warner or Bertelsmann. “In
fact.” said the Times. “once all the broken promises
about being a new breed of company for a new millennium are discounted, AOL
Time Warner does not seem to he in such had shape. considering
the economy.” Reporters
resist following to the end the cold logic of breakdown and collapse - even for
the fun of it. They can’t seem to help thinking that invariably, rationality
will emerge out of the current mess. If Martha Stewart goes to jail, the
world will have been righted. It’s all ultimately part of a healthy process.
After this period of resignations, terminations, investigations, and
reorganizations, normalcy will return. The
rules of reporting and analysis are that even if you have good reason to
suspect that the end is near, that events are largely out of control, that
very bad things will invariably happen to very bad companies, you’re not
allowed to say it. There’s just no formula or model for applying any sort of
chaos theory, or even gut sense, to business reporting or corporate analysis. You
couldn’t say what seemed pretty obvious: that nobody knew how to run the superaggregated and radically transformed companies that
came into being during the past decade. That these companies defied control,
were too vast and far-flung and composed of too many recalcitrant people and
inimical functions. This, together with the fact that the guys who ran these
companies often clearly had no idea what they were doing. Everybody
but the most literal-minded knew this. But
to be a respectable business reporter, you have to pretend the world is a
coherent, rational, by-the-numbers place. You can’t report that everything is
up for grabs, that the greatest likelihood is that we’re deep into a process
that will cause the reordering of most of the basic structures of the media
business—that the sky is falling. Now,
each of the management coups at AOL Time Warner, Vivendi,
and Bertelsmann during the summer of2002 was reported as a function of
internal travails, and that is obviously the case— each enterprise was
reporting its own variation on a looming cash crisis, which, in business
terms, is the mother of all crises. On the other hand, three is a trend.
Three indicates a mass movement, a systems issue, a rapidly spreading
condition. It is not just a function of bad management but of larger,
converging forces. History is turning against you—and is probably out to get
you. And there’s no way to manage yourself out of the
mess. But
responsible reporters can’t say that. Which is why I started to wonder if I
might have special powers. I
wondered if I didn’t see the natural unfolding of the business narrative just
as the most self-absorbed and megalomaniac CEO might see it: as an
existential drama that, by the sheer force of bravura narcissism, can be bent
to one’s will—or not, and then you lose control of it. That’s the game. All
or nothing. Play it well or blow it. What
we had surely learned was that all of these companies that have seen
themselves as part of some new, freer, liberating economic condition are
emotional creations—they are psychological as much as management case
studies. And to understand them, to be able to analyze them, you have to have
some appreciation of the unique dysfunction of their top managers—the nuances
of their hyperacquisitiveness and unsettling mood
elevations. But even now, business reporters can’t break the habit of assuming
that even the most imperial CEO is a tempered and rational being. And if he
isn’t, then he must be a crook—an anomaly, a terrible and unfortunate
exception. Now,
you’d be hard-pressed to get anyone to accept my theory (to accept it as an
analytic model, at any rate) that the larger and higher-profile the company,
the bigger the nutcase who runs it. But
let me push it. Many
of my journalistic colleagues, an earnest and respectful lot, seem to be of
the mind that what has happened at the various media companies that have
replaced top executives is a generally healthy move from personality-oriented
management to—in the figures of phlegmatic Richard Parsons at AOL TW, austere
Jean-René Fourtou at Vivendi,
and bland Gunter Thielen at Bertelsmann—less
charismatic, more nuts-and-bolts, more rational leadership. Well, yes,
possibly—perhaps everything works out nicely in the end. “AOL Time Warner’s
biggest problem—the one that its new management team is bound to tackle
first—is its credibility with investors and customers, not the soundness of
its various divisions,” wrote Saul Hansell in the
Times, giving the adults-are-back-in-charge analysis. I,
on the other hand, would theorize that what has happened at these companies
is merely a reverse psychosis—the flip side of the same condition. We have
just moved from the manic phase into clinical depression. At
Vivendi, the company is now run, in effect, by the
French government, depressed for half a century. At
Bertelsmann, the company is now run by the guy who, until just before his
surprise elevation, pressed the CDs. And
at AOL Time Warner, you have in Richard Parsons a canny imitation of the
walking dead. For
argument’s sake, and in the interest of developing a method by which we might
accurately predict the coming apocalypse of the media business, let’s assume
that these men will not deliberately disassemble what has so irrationally
been assembled. Let’s assume, too, that the hubris that created these
companies does not naturally convert to reason—rather, it converts from mania
to helplessness. In my model, then, these companies are now being run by men
much less temperamentally suited to run them than even the overblown figures
they’ve replaced. The situation has not gotten better; it has gotten worse
(and less fun too). More chaos. The
worst case, you have to figure, always gets worse. And
yet, everybody who should have been running screaming into the night or
hanging their head in shame would be showing up at Heilemann’s
and Batelle’s and Rattner’s
conference. Wolff’s
role as both participant and observer makes the reading of Autumn of
the Moguls more or less interesting, depending on your reaction to
personal anecdotes. By the end of the book, I knew more about the media
players than I ever desired to know. If you have an interest in media, or
curiosity, especially about the mighty mergers, give this book a try.
Otherwise, take a pass. Steve
Hopkins, February 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Autumn
of the Moguls.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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