این فصل را با ذکر تمام تیترهایش (تاکید میکنم تمام تیترهایش) به انگلیسی ساده و روان خلاصه کن    8	Leadership

Either lead, follow or get out of the way. (Sign on Ted Turner’s desk, pictured inFortune, 5 January 1987)

The leaders of media organisations have always commanded intense scrutiny from egulators, policy makers and the press. This is due in part to the potential of the edium: control of media content confers considerable opportunities to influence public opinion, build personal profile, gain access to politicians and, by extension, influence regulation and trade terms. The media industry has a long tradition of flamboyant leaders that tend to attract public attention, from the press barons of the arly twentieth century such as Hearst, Beaverbrook, Northcliffe and Rothermere, to contemporary leaders like Murdoch and Redstone. And high levels of public ttention are also given to today’s less flamboyant but equally influential tech-
edia moguls like Zuckerberg, Jobs or Bezos. But while the media devotes much ttention to the individuals shaping the industry, the subject of leadership in the edia industry has received far less attention from media management scholars, nd it has even been described as ‘arguably the single most neglected area of esearch and theory development in the field of media management’ (Mierzjewska nd Hollifield, in Albarran et al., 2006).

This chapter explores leadership in the media industry and its influence on strategy. It reviews theoretical approaches to the subject of leadership and the strands withi this body of research that are most frequently applied to the media sector. A number f cases are brought into this discussion which both contextualise the theory, and provide insights into the specific requirements of leadership in the media sector.
This chapter is therefore grounded in adaptive approaches to strategy – in that it eviews leaders’ role in shaping and implementing strategy from the perspective of eviewing how leaders employ the organisation’s social architecture to implement trategy.
 
What is leadership?
The study of leadership can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. Research from a anagement rather than an historical perspective began in earnest in the 1920s and
in the ensuing years leadership has been investigated from many different theoretical standpoints using an enormous variety of different methodological pproaches.

As research has progressed, perspectives have shifted. Universal recipes that ssume there is ‘one best way’ to lead have been buttressed by contingent rientations that stress the context-dependent nature of the leadership task. A tight instrumental focus on traits, skills and styles has been broadened to involve the
interactive processes between leaders and those led. A narrow leader-centric focus n the leader’s abilities and attributes has evolved into integrated conceptual frameworks encompassing relationships and the strategic context. Objectivist pproaches that see leadership as an absolute and measurable entity have been hallenged by subjectivist ones that view leadership as something constructed through social interaction.

The result is an extensive body of theory, but one lacking commonly-accepted definitions and riven by methodological divisions. Debate persists concerning fundamental issues, such as what leadership is (Bass, 1990; Yukl, 2002; Northouse, 2004). For example, does leadership reside in a set of qualities or characteristics belonging to those acting as leaders (Jago, 1982), or in a social influence process
hich seeks to get a group of individuals to move towards a specific objective (Jago, 1982; Kotter, 1988; Northouse, 2004)? Consensus is also lacking on where leadership is to be found. Some researchers view the terms of manager and leader s interchangeable (Conger, 1999), the assumption being that authority inevitably involves a degree of leadership. Others, for example transformational theorists, ssume leaders are senior figures involved in strategic decision-taking. Trait theories classify anyone with responsibility for achieving a given task that involves
group of individuals as a leader, especially if that individual has the specific ompetencies required or an influence over the situation.
 
Trait approaches – born to be a leader
Also known as ‘great person approaches’, trait approaches represent some of the arliest systematic research into leadership. In vogue from the early 1900s to the 1940s, trait approaches view leadership as residing in a set of definable,
easurable inborn traits that are possessed by ‘natural leaders’ (Jago, 1982), which ange from physical characteristics such as height, to aspects of personality and temperament, motivation, needs and values. Researchers sought to identify the traits that were linked positively with successful leaders and often turned to historical figures such as Napoleon or Gandhi for their data. The assumption was that once the ‘right’ traits had been identified, potential leaders could be identified by creening for these (Jago, 1982). Trait approaches held great intuitive appeal but, despite extensive research, a definitive list of leadership traits never emerged (Jago, 1982).
 
Risk-taking and media leadership

He gambled. [Jobs] put $50 or $60 million into Pixar. The gamble paid off. (Young and Simon, 2005: 247)

The business press tends to highlight media leaders’ entrepreneurial abilities and propensity for risky bets. This was as true in previous eras as it is today – coverag f Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs has all highlighted these aspects of their approach to leadership. This is ot surprising, since building businesses and making big bets make for compelling
edia headlines.

From the perspective of leadership theory, an entrepreneurial leader is understood s one who is closely attuned to environmental change, who employs a visceral ixture of intuition and experience to interpret this, and whose strategic behaviour involves hunting out opportunities in the environment and making bold resource ommitments in response to that change (Mintzberg et al., 1998). This definition is lose to that of the media mogul. Thus Tunstall and Palmer define such an individual as someone who:

owns and operates major media companies, who takes entrepreneurial risks
… who largely built up his own media empire: … [the] entrepreneurial element can include the launching of new media enterprises, … but often consists of largely buying up, and taking over, existing media companies. (1998: 105)

A facility with risk is common to both the concept of the entrepreneurial leader and f the media mogul. McClelland (1961) introduces a valuable distinction between ‘gambling’ and ‘calculating’, suggesting that successful entrepreneurial leaders take highly calculated risks rather than make gambles. Strategic risk-taking also features in biographical accounts of many media leaders. For example, Murdoch and Turner re both credited with a facility for risk, and in both cases it is implied that this is
n inborn trait rather than acquired skill. Both individuals have reportedly gambled ince childhood (Bibb, 1993; Shawcross, 1994; Auletta, 2004) and continued with isk-taking strategies as they built their empires. Thus it has been said that ‘no one lse bets the farm quite like Murdoch’ (Gibson, 2007), who is ‘the most gifted pportunist in the media’ (Pooley, 2007). Murdoch has a propensity for placing large bets on particular categories of content that stretches back at least three decades. For example, in the 1960s he broke a gentleman’s agreement among
 
Australian television executives not to pay more than $6,000 an hour for acquired programming and agreed to pay $1 million a year for everything that ABC produced r distributed for the next five years (Shawcross, 1994: 89–90).

In the digital media-technology sector, leaders’ risk-taking can stem from their personal, perhaps transgressive, vision for how the strategic environment will develop in the long term. Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley enture capital firm that has invested in new media firms, including Instagram, eddit, Tumblr, WhatsApp and YouTube, suggests that ‘the ability to resist [doing
hat others expect of them] is the difference between being a manager and a leader’. Bezos reputedly shares this ability to develop a vision and act on it. In
1998, after meeting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were looking for seed capital for their new internet search company, he insisted on investing personally, even though the funding round was closed. A colleague who helped make the transaction happen described how Bezos was ‘so prescient. It’s like he can peer into the future.
… He’s also extremely shrewd and self-aware and knows just how far he can push omething’ (Stone, 2013: 110).
 
Skills approaches – leadership can be learned
Trait approaches are absolute: they assume there is one best way to lead and that depends on a set of immutable predispositions. Skills approaches are more galitarian, seeing leadership as residing in a combination of skills which can be cquired through experiences such as training programmes, career progression,
entoring, and so on (Northouse, 2004). Thus leadership is within the gift of many, ather than a few.

Research in this field seeks to identify the learnable skills, knowledge, behaviours nd competencies that underlie effective leadership (Jago, 1982; Mumford et al., 2000; Northouse, 2004). Katz, who carried out much initial work in the field, identified three core categories (Katz, 1955). The first is technical skills. This is the ability ‘to work with things’ and includes analytical skills as well as expertise in domain-appropriate tools and techniques (although these are judged to be more important for lower-level leadership). The second is human skill. This is the ability to work effectively with colleagues at all levels, being sensitive to their perspectives, needs and motivations, and being able to create a climate of trust. Th third is conceptual skill – the ability to work with abstract ideas and hypothetical otions (Northouse, 2004).

During the 1990s the concept of skills was broadened into ‘capabilities’, nderstood as the ‘knowledge and skills that make effective leadership possible’ (Mumford et al., 2000: 12). As research progressed, the cognitive skills of solving problems and constructing solutions became a focus. These require a facility with bstract and hypothetical ideas that allows a leader to identify complex elationships and predict future events from current trends (Yukl, 2002), and find olutions to new, unusual and ill-defined problems (Mumford et al., 2000; Northouse, 2004).

Finding appropriate solutions to such problems becomes more difficult as nvironments become turbulent. The risk of cognitive rigidity and erroneous onclusions increases in step with environmental instability. Leaders must not only become more structured and vigilant in environmental scanning and problem- olving (Ancona, 1990), but also capable of challenging and updating their
perating assumptions. Schein (1992) terms this learning leadership. Learning can take place in two ‘modes’. In first-order, or single-loop, learning. This arises through repeated exposure to similar types of problem. The type of knowledge that rises is advantageous in stable contexts, especially if other players are new to an issue and do not possess it, but it can be a liability in turbulent ones since it reduce the likelihood of recognising a need for change (Weick, 1979). In unstable contexts double-loop, or second-order, learning can be required. This involves questioning
 
the governing norms, unlearning prior assumptions and developing new heuristics (Tushman and Anderson, 1986) and is central to improving the organisation’s bility to adapt (Virany et al., 1992). This mindset is central to theories of disruption, and unsurprisingly shared by many leaders in tech and Silicon Valley, Jeff Bezos for example.

It can be argued that single-loop learning aided Michael Eisner during his first decade at Disney, and that weaknesses in double-loop learning contributed to his downfall in the second. During his first decade, when the media industry was elatively stable, he applied the formula that had brought him success in his previous role at Paramount (and indeed the position of CEO at Disney): keep budgets low, eschew expensive stars, control all aspects of the organisation losely, grow internally where possible, and stick to the areas you know well (Stewart, 2005: 80). However, 10 years on the context had changed. Digitalisation nd the internet had taken hold, convergence was under way and blockbuster trategies were entrenched. The assumptions that had served Eisner so well previously were no longer appropriate. Big budgets were unavoidable if Disney
ovies were to compete with other major studios. The new business areas that ere emerging as a result of convergence were far outside the traditional media ealm and made alliance or acquisition a smarter strategy than internal growth.
Eisner was not comfortable with this, and, for example, rejected a proposal to buy minority interest in Yahoo!, choosing instead to merge its own internet assets into new portal, Go!, a decision that ultimately cost over $1 billion on paper (Stewart,
2005). The Pixar joint venture is a notable exception to the ‘grow businesses internally’ rule, and this came to account for 45 per cent of the Disney film studio’s perating income between 1998 and 2001.
 
Leadership skills in the media
There is a slim body of research into leadership skills required in the media sector. Sanchez-Tabernero (in Küng, 2006) identifies the ability to ‘build great teams’.
This involves a long-term orientation, an ability to motivate, strong beliefs, and an nderstanding of consumer tastes. While not addressing the media industry pecifically, Burns and Stalkers’ (1961/1994: 102) research into environments that further innovation identifies two leadership skills: to grasp the changing dynamics f the strategic environment, particularly technological ones, and recalibrate the internal organisation in step; and to ‘define the work situation, displaying … the ommitments, effort, and self-involvement … the individual … should attempt to
eet’.

The ability to see business opportunities in turbulent environments surfaces frequently in analyses of successful media leaders. In her research into the stablishment of the UK pay television platform BSkyB, Spar (2001) highlights Murdoch’s skill at designing business models that exploit multiple uncertainties – in that case advances in satellite and encryption technologies, a regulatory vacuum rising from the confluence of domestic and EU broadcasting regulation, and the UK government desire to increase competition in UK broadcasting:

Again and again, the same pattern unfolded: Sky would recognise how some emerging technology could enable the firm either to leap through a regulatory barrier or consolidate a competitive foothold. Then Sky’s managers would move to grasp this technology, develop it, create whatever standard might be necessary, and thus control its usage by any other parties. This was how Murdoch had first used satellite technologies to circumvent the otherwise solid net of British regulation: this was how Sky operated throughout the next decade. (Spar, 2001: 156)

When Sky Broadcasting first burst onto the British scene, it simultaneously circumvented one set of rules and established another. Officially … Sky was not transmitting under British jurisdiction: it was beaming from Luxembourg and subject only to that country’s minimal set of rules. And even on the ground, where Sky was subject to British law, the novelty of Sky’s practices made it very difficult to lodge legal complaints against it. Was Sky a monopolist? It’s hard to say. Did it behave anti-competitively? Hard again. It was a classic case of creative anarchy, with technology opening spaces and creating markets that defied existing regulation. (Spar, 2001: 183–4)

Today, we see similar leadership strategies that are designed to exploit ambiguities
 
nd vacuums in regulatory environments arising from differences in the pace of development in technology markets and the slowness at which regulatory regimes hange, particularly on the part of technology giants such as Google and Amazon.

Ted Turner, the path-breaking founder of cable news provider CNN, has also been described as someone who ‘sees the obvious before most people do. … And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everyone’ (Wallace and Marer, 1991). In Turner’s ase ‘the obvious’ was the potential created by combining a number of technological advances – satellite distribution, cable television, handicams, small atellite up-links – with a government agenda to boost cable television and the broadcast networks’ scaling back of news coverage. CNN started when he created the world’s first satellite superstation by placing the signal of his small local Atlanta station on the newly launched RCE satellite which distributed the signal to able systems around the country, thus acquiring a domestic audience of millions
nd viewers in Canada and Mexico.

Figure 8.1How BSkyB exploited technological and regulatory uncertainty (Küng)
 
Style approaches
In the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s dissatisfaction with trait approaches led esearchers to focus on leadership style, that is, on leadership behaviour and its impact on others (Stogdill, 1974; Jago, 1982; Yukl, 2002). The first empirical tudies were conducted at Ohio State University in the late 1940s. Two dimensions f leadership were identified: consideration – the degree of two-way
ommunication and consultation, mutual trust, respect and warmth a leader exhibits towards his followers; and ‘initiating structure’ – the degree to which a leader rganises relationships between group members and establishes channels of ommunication and methods of establishing the group’s task. These dimensions
ere used to identify the optimal leadership style. Research suggested that an ffective leader developed good rapport and two-way communication, and took an ctive role in planning and directing group activities. Subsequent research by the University of Michigan identified two critical dimensions of leadership style – mployee-centred (concern for people) and job-centred (concern for production). In the mid-1980s Blake and Mouton used these dimensions as the basis for a diagnostic tool for managers, the ‘managerial grid’, which identified five different leadership archetypes.
 
Leadership styles in the media
Research into leadership skills in the media makes some prescriptive ecommendations concerning leadership style. These follow a general line that onsensus-based approaches are more appropriate than hierarchical authoritarian nes because creative employees resent being told what to do (Davis and Scase, 2000), will not accept unquestioningly directions from above (Lavine and Wackman, 1988), and when working as news journalists need editorial freedom nd protection from managerial or owner influence (Curran and Seaton, 1981). Ari nd Bughin (2005) propose two leadership styles for media organisations: an
inspirational, charismatic, hands-on style; and a performance-orientated, structured tyle, involving systematic setting of strategic corporate and individual goals.
 
Transformational leadership
A major recent concept in leadership theory is ‘transformational leadership’. The rigins of this are credited to political sociologist Burns (1978), who identified a leader who changes organisations elementally – transforms them – by evoking followers’ intrinsic motivation and harnessing this to realise performance outcomes that exceed expectations. The focus on intrinsic motivation distinguishes transformational from ‘transactional’ leadership, where followers act in a certain
ay in return for specified extrinsic rewards (Conger, 1989).

The transformational leader’s levers to achieve wide-scale change in an rganisation are elements in the social architecture of the organisation (Conger, 1989; Senge, 1990; Bass and Avolio, 1994; Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999). A key lever is the leader’s vision for how the organisation should look post- transformation. This should be compelling enough to encourage individuals to question assumptions that might hold back the change process, find new solutions to xisting problems, and select new courses of action (Senge, 1990). The leader’s harisma, termed idealised influence in this body of theory, builds emotional ommitment to the vision by engaging followers’ higher order needs and
ncouraging them to transcend self-interest in order to reach new goals (Bass, 1985; Kotter, 1996; Hitt et al., 1998). The transformational leader also changes the ultural assumptions (Morgan, 1986; Sackmann, 1991; Schein, 1992), employing a umber of mechanisms to embed new ones. Critical are coaching and mentoring key ‘change agents’, providing growth opportunities to followers, which issues a leade pays attention to, decisions about who is promoted or who ‘gets sent to Siberia’ (Schein, 1992), reactions to critical events and how resources are allocated.
Mintzberg and Westley (1992) note that transformational leaders often have a strong facility for language, particularly symbolism and metaphor. This process of
hanging a group’s shared cultural assumptions also means changing that group’s ocial identity, since leadership and identity are interdependent.

In his exploration of how incumbent businesses threatened by digitalisation should dapt their organisations, Waldman (2010) proposes a leadership approach that choes many tenets of transformational leadership. He views the ability to ‘bring people with you in challenging times’ (2010: 130–1) as the essence of the leadership task. This requires clarity (‘people need to know what is happening:
hy, how and when’), consistency (‘don’t just present a plan once; present it time nd time again … you are leading people on a journey, not a set of random dance oves’), and collaboration (‘getting people working with people from different parts of the business, tackling business problems collectively, is energising and onstructive. It makes people feel they are part of something bigger’).

 
Greg Dyke – Transformational Leadership at the BBC
Greg Dyke’s tenure as Director General of the BBC (2000–2003) carries the hallmarks of transformational leadership. In 2002 he launched an ambitious initiative, ‘Making it Happen’, which was designed to make the BBC hugely more creative, and to redress the damage to the social fabric of the organisation that had resulted from a change initiative introduced by his predecessor. Called ‘Producer Choice’, this project had established an internal market between producers and broadcasters and involved a complete restructuring of the entire organisation. Both concept and execution were complex, the project was resented as the brainchild of consultants and never ‘penetrated the heartland editorial areas of the BBC’ (Spindler and van den Brul, 2006–7).
Dyke’s change initiative was anchored in his belief that greater creativity and better service to audiences would ensure the BBC’s survival as a publicly funded broadcaster in a multi-channel environment. ‘Making it Happen’ was his answer. Rather than driven by consultants, it should be a ‘do-it-yourself’ intervention designed to harness the energy, commitment and ideas of the BBC’s thousands of staff (Spindler and van den Brul, 2006–7).

Dyke employed a number of strategies to build commitment for his initiative. First were the ‘Just Imagine’ brainstorming workshops where 10,000 staff contributed over 25,000 ideas about the BBC’s challenges and how these might be overcome. A handful of the best ideas were implemented very publicly within weeks to demonstrate that staff involvement was valued. Dyke also abandoned the formal communication style of his predecessor. All staff were on first name terms, meeting documentation was reduced to a minimum and yellow cards stating ‘Cut the Crap, Make it Happen’ were distributed for staff to use if they saw good ideas being rejected or bureaucracy surfacing.

Next, Dyke published a new set of BBC values which he stressed should become the bedrock of the new culture. Staff teams were asked to propose how the BBC could realise its new goals, and from these emerged a BBC-wide change plan with five main sections: Providing Great Leadership; Making the BBC a Great Place to Work; Getting Closer to our Audiences; Inspiring Creativity Everywhere; and Working as One BBC (in total over 40 separate initiatives). These were presented to staff through televised, interactive BBC-wide ‘conversations’ involving 17,000 staff at over 400 meetings.
The project succeeded. Internal research two years in showed that 62 per cent of staff felt ‘Making it Happen’ was making a real difference, 22 per cent were actively championing change, 58 per cent felt valued, and 50 per cent felt management behaviour was consistent with BBC values.

This project conforms to transformational leadership theory (Kanter, 2004). Dyke harnessed staff members’ intrinsic motivation and altered the BBC’s social fabric to achieve fundamental change. He encouraged staff to rethink their assumptions, find new solutions to the BBC’s problems, and change day-to-day behaviour. He succeeded
 


 
Kotter’s Eight-Stage Process for Transformational Change

When I went to the Harvard Business School back in 1989 I luckily came across a brilliant professor called John Kotter, who was the first person who I had come across who talked about the difference between management and leadership. (Greg Dyke, Speaking to Senior Executives at Ashridge Management College, 16 March 2009)

It is rare for academic leadership theory to penetrate day-to-day leadership in media organisations. An exception is Kotter’s eight-stage process for leading strategic change (Kotter, 1996), which provided the conceptual basis for Dyke’s transformation of the BBC (key steps in this are outlined in Figure 8.2 below).
Kotter’s approach starts by drawing a central distinction between the role of the leader and that of the manager: leadership is about change while management is about maintenance. Thus the leader’s job is to ‘do the right things’, which means set the vision and design strategies to achieve it, empower others to make vision happen, and motivate and inspire people to move out of their comfort zone. The manager’s role is to ‘do things right’. This means turn strategies into action steps, plans and budgets, ensure the organisation can realise the vision, and check progress and trouble shoot.
Kotter believes that the leader must not only recognise when fundamental change is needed, but also ensure that this happens. More often than not, change efforts fail. They fail not because the strategy or vision is wrong, but because things like culture, bureaucracy, politics, lack of trust, lack of teamwork, arrogance, fear of the unknown, block the change efforts. Kotter’s prescription for change seeks to eliminate these barriers. It has eight steps, which need to be followed sequentially, with no skipping ahead. These are:

1.	Establish a sense of urgency

This means alarming people enough to get them to let go of the status quo. Pay special attention to key people who may end up much worse off, or they will become ‘change critics’. Work really hard on this – building urgency will pay off later.
2.	Create a guiding coalition

Achange project needs a strong change team behind it. Check all the ‘true leaders’ are on board and visibly committed and make sure it’s diverse. All departments, all levels. Invest in team building so that it really works together.

3.	Create a vision

The vision has to provide a compelling reason why people should abandon self- interests and buy into uncomfortable changes. Craft the language – the entire change team needs to be able to describe the vision in five minutes or less. Everyone needs to practise the ‘vision speech’ often.
 
4.	Communicate the vision

This new vision will have to compete with hundreds of other messages. Communicate it directly as much as you can – also indirectly via what you pay attention to, who is promoted and rewarded (and who is side-lined).
5.	Empower others to act on the vision

Get rid of barriers to change fast, including people who are resisting change. Anything that undermines the vision – job descriptions, bonus criteria, internal rules – must go. Ensure those who take risks, break with tradition and make change happen are rewarded.

6.	Create short-term wins

Ensure there are some visible successes early on. Transformation takes time, and quick wins ensure the urgency doesn’t fade. Leaders need to choose things that are fast, feasible and failsafe, avoid anything expensive or involving ‘change critics’. It is important to analyse the pros and cons before starting – failure with an early goal can hurt the entire initiative.

7.	Build on change

Leaders must be careful not to declare victory too soon. They must keep reinvigorating the change process with new projects and change agents, and after each success, analyse what went right and what could be done better. They need to keep checking systems and policies to see if they fit the vision, and hire and promote people who get the vision and will take it further.
8.	Anchor new approaches in the culture

The final stage is to ensure changes are consolidated and organisation doesn’t slip back. The leader must make it evident that the changes are bringing success, which means taking every opportunity to demonstrate their benefits until they become an accepted part of ‘the way we do things around here’.

Figure 8.2Greg Dyke‘s implementation of Kotter‘s 8-Stage Change Process at the BBC
 
Charismatic leadership

His remarkable charisma … that drew people to him even when they knew he might attack at any moment, created a degree of loyalty few executives ever match. (A colleague describing Steve Jobs, cited in Young and Simon, 2005: 201)

Charismatic leadership is a close cousin of transformational leadership (Hunt and Conger, 1999). This form of leadership occurs when a leader employs personal
agnetism to evoke followers’ trust and to influence them to act in certain ways in the pursuit of specific goals (Bass, 1985; Conger, 1989, 1999; Conger and Kanungo, 1998; Yukl, 2002). Like transformational approaches, charismatic leadership is understood as collective, processual and also as attributional – that is, it exists in the perceptions of others – and has been found to improve employee atisfaction, motivation and performance (Yukl, 1999).

As with transformational approaches, vision is a central tool of charismatic leadership. A definition of a visionary is someone with an inner vision that is not upported by external facts. Steve Jobs’ vision to build ‘insanely great’ machines that will ‘make a dent in the world’ swept away rational objections. An Apple mployee describes how: ‘We really believed in what we were doing. The key thing is that we weren’t in it for the money. We were out to change the world’ (Trip Hawkins, cited in Young and Simon, 2005: 62).

Jeff Bezos is another leader with a vision that for many years seemed untethered from business realities. Here is Eric Schmidt, founder of Google, on Bezos’ vision (Stone, 2013: 17):

To me Amazon is a story of a brilliant founder who personally drove the vision. … There are almost no better examples. Perhaps Apple, but people forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work. It kept piling up losses. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

A vision should appeal to followers’ higher-order needs and link with their own alues and ideals. As evident in the quote above, this engenders emotional ommitment and encourages group members to cooperate to achieve their ollective task (House, 1977; Conger, 1999; Yukl, 2002). The vision will often epresent a marked departure from what has gone before, but not be so dramatic
 
that followers might reject it, and it should resonate with follower disenchantment ith current conditions. To embed their vision, the charismatic leader models the
behaviours, norms and values followers should adopt. He or she may also act nconventionally – making self-sacrifices or taking personal risks, for example – to nderline the importance of the changes that need to be made.

The distinction between transformational and charismatic leadership is not easy to stablish. The fields certainly overlap. Conger (1999) sees charismatic leadership s an offshoot of transformational leadership, now of almost equal stature.
Certainly, charisma is central to transformational leadership. However, Bass (in Yukl, 1999) argues that a leader can be charismatic without being transformational. It is suggested that the emotional component on the part of leaders and followers distinguishes charismatic leadership as particularly concerning the compelling ature of the vision and the way it is communicated (Conger and Kanungo, 1998).

Further, while transformational leadership is normally understood as a positive oncept, charismatic leadership has a shadow side – as can be inferred from the quote about Steve Jobs above. Similarly, Stone’s (2013: 222) account of the rise of Amazon includes a fascinating list of Bezos’ insults to staff compiled by company eterans. These include ‘Are you lazy or just incompetent?’, ‘We need to apply
ome human intelligence to this problem’ and ‘This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A team document?’

Howell (in Conger, 1999) sees leadership as running a spectrum from leaders who mpower and develop their followers, to authoritarian and narcissistic ones who se their power for personal gains. Conger (1999) argues that a charismatic leader ay well possess elements of both poles. The success of charismatic leadership is ffected by context (Bryman et al., 1996). While charismatic leaders improve mployee satisfaction, motivation and performance, they can also underestimate
threats in the organisational environment, screen out negative information, be verly self-confident and have an inflated sense of their own importance (Yukl, 1999). A charismatic leader’s strategy may fail if implemented either too early or too late in a strategic initiative (Conger and Kanungo, 1998).

 
Jonah Peretti – Buzzfeed’s Charismatic Founder1
‘The Web’s king of viral content’ (Dixon, 2012), Jonah Peretti founded BuzzFeed in 2006 as a side project to his role at theHuffington Post, which he had co-founded a year earlier. Peretti was a parallel entrepreneur until 2011, when AOL bought the Huffington Postand he switched to focus on BuzzFeed alone. Peretti’s initial vision for BuzzFeed was an experimental ‘viral-content skunkworks’ (Oremus, 2014) that would track viral memes and explore, using data analysis techniques, which characteristics made users want to send a piece of content on to others. BuzzFeed’s timing was excellent – it was perfectly placed to exploit the convergence between social and mobile (social users tend to be mobile users) and the spread of mobile devices and consumption. When Peretti founded BuzzFeed Twitter did not exist and Facebook was in its infancy. By the time he left HuffPo to concentrate on BuzzFeed full-time, Twitter and Facebook had reached critical mass and the social/mobile era had arrived. BuzzFeed could rise naturally with the social media tide. Although privately held at time of writing, BuzzFeed’s reputed valuation is around $1.5 billion and investments in news content alone for the first half of 2014 were around $10 million.

Peretti ticks all the boxes for a classic charismatic leader and his conceptual approach is stamped on all aspects of his organisation. A visionary, he saw an opportunity in an emergent field and built an organisation capable of grasping it. He is a natural communicator who constructed a compelling narrative to explain the BuzzFeed concept. He is also an intuitive strategist who has helped create two of the world’s leading digital media organisations, who seems able to distil the salient learnings out of history, theory and personal experience and turn these into a business plan.
 
Leading for creativity
An important aspect of strategic leadership in the media relates to the connection between leadership and creativity. This is another under-explored issue, although general suggestions have been made for organisations that need creativity, for xample that hierarchical, paternalistic management styles limit creativity, and inclusive ones that distribute creative decision-making throughout the organisation promote sustained creativity (Mauzy and Harriman, 2003).

For insights into how leadership intersects with levels of creativity inside rganisations we can refer back to theories of organisational creativity. These identify three obvious links. The first is intrinsic motivation. This is central to transformational and charismatic leadership theories, and also to creativity theories, although it confers different advantages: in creativity theory, intrinsic
otivation catalyses expertise and creative-thinking skills in the pursuit of novel olutions; in leadership theories, intrinsic motivation promotes followers’ eceptivity to higher-order goals and suppresses self-interest.

The second link is vision. A leader’s vision drives strategic action, especially hen seeking to achieve transformational change. Vision is central to creativity lso, since no new product or service can be created without a clear vision that is imple, achievable, but also stretching and inspiring. The ‘right’ vision will
esonate with pre-existing intrinsic motivation and lay the seed for ultimate success by sparking both a creative response to the core concept and a deeper-lying sense
f commitment to its fundamental goals.

The third link involves establishing an environmental context conducive to reativity. This is addressed, albeit tangentially, in the ‘initiating structure’ dimension of leadership discussed in style approaches, where the leader is viewed s the architect of the work environment, dictating the nature of creative challenges, how resources are allocated, and establishing wider contextual elements such as tructure, coordination mechanisms, culture, business processes and management.
The provision of autonomy for teams required to be creative also features. At Pixar Ed Catmull’s leadership approach explicitly seeks to build an environment where reativity flourishes, and many components of this correlate closely with theories
f organisational creativity. A fascinating dimension of this concerns his focus on failure and extracting learning from this. For example, he seeks to ensure that teams feel safe to fail: ‘Part of our job is to protect the new from people who don’t nderstand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so- greatness’ (Catmull, 2014: 132). Indeed, failure itself is not a problem, although, as reative director Andrew Stanton puts it, ‘People need to be wrong as fast as they an’ (cited in Catmull, 2014: 97). There are not only post-mortems after movies are
 
omplete but mid-mortems half way through the process. During these sessions participants are asked to list the top five things they would do again, and the top five they wouldn’t. Performance data is used to stimulate discussion and challenge ssumptions based on subjective impressions. This focus on and reframing of failure as an opportunity for growth and creativity has an emotional dimension in that he requires leaders to be honest about their mistakes to make it safe for others to do the same, reflecting the belief that ‘being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them’ (Catmull, 2014: 111).

Indeed, a fourth point of connection concerns emotions. Emotional commitment by the leader and emotional engagement on the part of followers are fundamental to transformational and charismatic leadership. Emotions – desire, enjoyment, interest
are also present in the intrinsically motivated state, which is central to rganisational creativity. The role of emotions in leadership has been
cknowledged – Burns (1978), for example, argued that the genius of Mao Tse Tung as his understanding of others’ emotions – but is as yet an emerging branch of
leadership theory.

 
Michael Eisner at Walt Disney
Eisner’s two-decade tenure as Disney’s CEO provides valuable insights into the interrelationships between a leader, his strategy and creative outcomes. In 1984 Disney was an ‘all but dead duck’, struggling to maintain its independence and no longer even classified by the industry as a studio. ‘Team Disney’, comprising Michael Eisner, as Chairman and CEO, Frank Wells as President and COO, and Jeffrey Katzenberg as head of the film studio, was brought in to rescue the organisation.
Between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s the Walt Disney Company (it was renamed in 1986) underwent a remarkable turnaround. In four years it became the number one ranked studio as existing areas such as animation were revitalised (The Lion King, released in 1994 had by 1995 become the second largest grossing film ever) and new businesses were developed (including publishing, retailing and baseball). By 1987 Disney was a vertically integrated conglomerate with an operating income that had jumped from $300 million to nearly $800 million.2 It was one of the most valuable brands in the world and a case study on its tight internal management and aggressive exploitation of synergies was taught in MBAschools worldwide.3
Eisner ascribes much of the success to his formula for creative leadership (Wetlaufer, 2000). Acentral building block was the Monday staff meetings

where people are not afraid to speak their minds and be irreverent … an environment in which people feel safe to fail [and where] criticism for submitting a foolish idea is abolished. … We like to think we have fun here – we’re looseygoosey’ [with a] ‘freewheeling, spontaneous exchange of ideas’, [but at the same time discussion is] ‘brutally honest’, which was ‘confidence building’. (Eisner, cited in Wetlaufer, 2000)

In terms of resources, creative staff had time to incubate ideas because green-light decisions were deliberately delayed. Autonomy was furthered because the long creative meetings were ‘non-hierarchical – everybody becomes equal’. Eisner describes himself as ‘a great believer in initiative and responsibility at every level’. He also supported diversity in creative teams because this was ‘a great force towards creativity … the more diverse the organisation, the more diverse the ideas that get expressed’ (Stewart, 2005).

However, in 1994 things started to go wrong. Wells was killed in a helicopter crash, Eisner underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery, and Katzenberg, having been denied Well’s job, left to found Dreamworks SKG. In the ensuing years Dreamworks’ and Pixar’s animated films started to outperform Disney’s. Live action films started to do poorly, and video and merchandising income fell, as did earnings and stock price.
Disney’s internet portal, Go.com, was closed in 2001 with an $800 million charge. Unsurprisingly, Eisner’s reputation soured. In 2003 Roy Disney and Stanley Gold started a campaign to oust him, charging him with ‘cultural decay’. Ayear later, Comcast launched a hostile bid, and negotiations concerning the renewal of the Pixar joint venture that had contributed so handsomely to Disney’s profits fell apart. In March of that year 45 per cent of shareholders voted to withhold support for Eisner’s
 
re-election. Eisner subsequently announced his resignation.

Disney’s poor financial performance was attributed in large part to Eisner’s creative leadership and criticism became widespread. For example, ‘Eisner’, it was said, ‘managed creative ventures, Steve [Jobs] created’ (Young and Simon, 2005: 305).
Eisner was accused of being ‘such an oppressive force that creative talents felt muzzled’ (Young and Simon, 2005: 311), and of ‘extinguishing the company’s creative spark’. Politics inside the Disney organisation were said to be ‘cut-throat’ (Stewart, 2005) and the focus on synergy led to ‘endless iterations of existing properties’.4 If these criticisms are correct (and they stem primarily from business journalists who conceivably sympathised with Disney’s beleaguered creatives and were perhaps envious of Eisner’s compensation package), they suggest that although Eisner did institute mechanisms to further creativity, other aspects of his management priorities undermined these.
Alarge part of Disney’s financial turnaround between 1984 and 1989 was due to more than doubling the revenues and margins at the theme parks, rather than aspects of Eisner’s creative leadership (Knee, Greenwald and Seave, 2009: 255). Yet application of theories of organisation creativity would suggest that his vaunted creative leadership approach may well actually have undermined the creativity he was seeking to foster. In terms of the creative challenge, the profit-multiplier business model that was the engine behind Disney’s stellar financial performance (Slywotsky et al., 1997) had the unintended effect of limiting the creative challenge and with encouraging a concentration on consumer characters that fit existing merchandising categories.
Further, since compensation levels were tied to synergies, there was contingent extrinsic motivation which theory suggests would have crowded out intrinsic motivation (Frey and Jegen, 2000).

The Monday staff meetings were described as follows by Michael Ovitz, a leading Hollywood agent and one-time friend, who was brought in as Eisner’s second in command but sacked acrimoniously soon after:

Although the focal point of [Eisner’s] management of the company [was] extolling the freewheeling, spontaneous exchange of ideas and the ‘synergy’ that he was so proud of, there was actually very little exchange of ideas. Most of the lunch was a stream of consciousness monologue by Eisner. No one disagreed with anything he said. (Stewart, 2005: 219)

Financial control was tight. For Eisner, ‘discipline is also part of creativity’, but he was perceived as ‘rapacious, soul-less, and always looking for a quick buck’.5 According to theory, a tight limit on financial resources restricts intrinsic motivation and circumscribes experimentation. Autonomy was compromised by Eisner’s: ‘centralised and controlling management style [which led] … managers [to] feel second guessed; [and] artists [were afraid of] surrendering creative freedom’ as well as Eisner’s propensity to ‘sweat the details’.6
 
Collaborative leadership in the media

One of the advantages we had at Pixar, from the beginning, was that technology, art, and business were integrated into the leadership, with each of the company’s leaders – me, John, and Steve, paying a fair amount of attention to the areas where we weren’t considered expert. We have worked assiduously, ever since, to maintain a balance between all three legs of this stool. (Ed Catmull, 2014: 204)

Leadership is often reflexively assumed to be a singular activity. In fact, this is eldom the case. In practice, while one leader may hold ultimate authority, frequently leadership is distributed between individuals, classically in the traditional combinations of CEO and COO, or of Chairman and CEO. The issue of ollaborative leadership, of course, is addressed in the corporate governance literature, and within leadership theory there is an emerging stream of research into ollaborative leadership structures. It has been acknowledged that the role of
leader is not restricted to a formally-designated individual, that leaders and followers can swap positions, and that multiple leadership roles may exist in a ingle group, with each serving a different leadership function (Jago, 1982).
Change initiatives that involve a number of leaders operating at different levels of firm have been found to be more effective (Pettigrew and Whipp, 1991), and
ultiple leaders are often required to change the culture of organisations failing to dapt to a changed environment (Schein, 1992).

Distributed leadership (Ancona et al., 2007) is a hybrid model combining concepts from skills and transformational/charismatic approaches. This involves four apabilities: sensemaking (understanding the context); relating (listening actively, dvocating a point of view, and connecting with others); visioning (the
ollaborative creation of a common vision); and inventing (transforming a vision into a present-day reality). Since few individuals possess all four capabilities,
ost leaders will need to find others with whom they can work. As a result, the leadership task will be dispersed. There is an interesting correlation between this odel and the findings of research into leadership derailment discussed below.
Both highlight the importance of a leader’s ability to relate to others and use this as basis for a leadership team, and be able to lead in dynamic and complex nvironments.

In the media industry collaborative leadership arrangements are common and there is anecdotal evidence that such models have a positive impact on performance.
This makes intuitive sense for all industries, not just the media ones. The increasing omplexity of the business environment and the leadership task makes it unlikely
 
that a single individual will encompass all the competencies necessary to master both external and internal environments. Pixar has always had collaborative leadership. In the early days Roy and Walt Disney shared the running of their tudio: ‘Roy was the guardian, the protector who allowed genius to flourish … not nly freeing Walt to make creative decisions, but running the business side of Disney with great skill’ (Bennis and Biederman, 1997: 45).

Eisner’s most successful period at Disney also featured collaborative leadership. He was Chairman and CEO, but was supported by Frank Wells, who handled the dministrative and financial tasks, and was the ‘filter and interpreter who turned Eisner’s ideas into practical reality’ (Young and Simon, 2005: 204) leaving Eisner to run the creative side (Stewart, 2005), and also by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who possessed great skills in crafting creative concepts (Young and Simon, 2005).
Despite the fact that Eisner never sought to recreate this structure, once he lost his two co-leaders, he acknowledged the importance of shared leadership: ‘the most uccessful movie studios and television networks have had at least two strong xecutives at the top, supporting and counterbalancing one another’ (Eisner, cited i Stewart, 2005: 142).

The case of BBC News Online provides insights into how collaborative leadership brings positive results in creative contexts. This venture had a dual leadership tructure whereby the two leaders contributed to creating an environment conduciv to creativity in different but complementary ways. John Birt, the BBC’s Director General, established preconditions by setting a creative goal that resonated with the BBC’s self-perceptions, providing the resources and ensuring autonomy, and then tepped back and allowed the venture to operate autonomously. He never actually isited the operation, but followed its progress closely at second hand. Bob Eggington, project manager, realised Birt’s vision on the ground and on a day-to- day basis, providing strategic clarity by shielding the venture from the bureaucracy f the parent and establishing a positive culture.
 
Strategic leadership in the digital media era
The turmoil of the digital era has created substantial challenges for leaders in the edia sector. The velocity and scope of change, the uncertainty about its amifications, the ascendancy of technology, and the emergence of entirely new ontent categories mean that leaders must master a far wider range of issues than as necessary before. Research into this strategic leadership challenge (Küng, 2016) identified four separate dimensions of the leadership task in legacy media rganisations:
 
Role 1: The strategist
This role is about ensuring the organisation can navigate the ‘valley of death’, that is, can successfully master the technological turmoil affecting the sector. The elevant body of knowledge is strategic management, but the leader will need to hoose concepts cleverly, since as we have seen in Chapter 3, many tools and techniques in the field are predicated on a stable environment. This dimension of the leadership task is directed at both internal and external constituencies: a trategy needs to meet owners’ and shareholders’ expectations about financial and
arket performance, and set priorities that provide a guide to action for those inside the organisation.
 
Role 2: Creative hero
At the heart of this dimension of the leadership task is the need to build a robust pipeline of successful creative products. It is probably the most natural role for edia leaders, many of whom have come up through the creative or journalistic
anks. It is also the role least likely to encounter resistance from the organisation: reative workers usually want to be creative and support leaders who encourage this. This dimension of leadership involves focusing organisational energy on boosting creativity and building a pipeline of competitively successful products, nd thus squarely on the internal organisation, on creating an organisational nvironment that allows new ideas to bubble up and be nurtured into successful products. As we saw in Chapter 5, this makes strategic sense: if the products the rganisation creates are not compelling, performance will suffer. Conversely, if the rganisation can generate a consistent stream of compelling and engaging products, the foundations of sustainability and performance have been laid: consumers, staff nd financial stakeholders will be happy. So the higher the levels of product reativity, the greater the likelihood of market success and competitive advantage.

But creativity, which can anyway never be summoned on demand, gets even trickier hen products, platforms and consumption devices are evolving as rapidly as they urrently are. And the digital ‘disruptors’ such as Google, Amazon and Apple have further amplified the urgency for creativity in the classic mass media: while they
ay have developed powerful positions in distribution and sales to consumers, these organisations are still dependent on media organisations to produce professional content. Content is the last bastion of traditional media’s expertise, nd the stage in the value chain that the digital disruptors are finding it hardest to rack, thus content creativity is the legacy media’s ace in the handvis-à-visthe new ompetitors.
 
Role 3: Geek
This leadership dimension revolves around an ability to understand digital technologies and put them at the heart of the organisation, to insert technological wareness and expertise into its very DNA. It sits between the roles of strategist nd creative hero, and leaders that master it bring enormous strategic advantage to their organisations: technology is shaping strategy, and technology is shaping products. But the geek role is perhaps the trickiest media leadership dimension of ll. It involves understanding the basic trajectory of technology developments and
how they may impact the media industry. For many, this involves an uncomfortable prioritisation – of science over art, of numbers over words. Media leaders are ften not ‘numbers people’. They prefer to leave technology to the specialists and oncentrate instead on content, creativity and strategy.
 
Role 4: Corporate steward
This dimension of the leadership role differs from the others in that elements of it re officially prescribed, and clearly delineated in governance structures. It is also nique in that its focus is external, on owners, regulators, politicians and society.
As ‘steward’, a leader carries the legal and moral responsibility for the rganisation’s activities with respect to the needs of society. These considerations re central to the leadership function but can be overshadowed by competitive pressures and strategic initiatives. This can have serious consequences for leaders’ eputations, as Rupert and James Murdoch found out to their cost in the phone- hacking scandal in the UK in the summer of 2012.

This dimension of leadership has a number of unique characteristics. First, it has lements that are prescribed by regulation. A leader can decide to what extent he or he will be a strategist, geek or creative hero. But the role of steward is not ptional. All leaders must ensure their organisation meets regulations concerning orporate governance, such as establishing transparent and accountable
anagement reporting, procedures and processes. Media organisations must also onform to an additional set of industry-specific regulations. These concern haracteristics of the content they produce and requirements to protect consumers, particularly children, from harm and offence. Although media regulation is xtensive, there is also a grey area surrounding the boundaries of public taste and
hat constitutes ethical practice that can cause problems for leaders. When does overage of celebrities’ public lives cross the line from serving public interest to press intrusion? Which investigative journalism practices are acceptable? For
edia companies, the boundaries of public taste are sometimes evident only when they have been over-stepped.

 
BBC Director Generals and their Leadership Priorities
It is self-evident that a single individual is unlikely to master all of these roles. In the absence of collaborative leadership structures, one pragmatic and probably instinctive strategy for reducing role overload is to concentrate on one or two dimensions of the role, and pay less attention to the others. The history of recent BBC Director Generals shows how this can play out.
 
Sir John Birt (1992–2000)
Birt mastered three aspects of the leadership role: strategist, geek and corporate steward. He was a prescient early advocate of digital technologies, and his foresighted internet strategy means that the BBC is still a strong global player in digital media.
Birt was also skilful in building relationships with politicians, to the extent that, despite hostile attitudes towards the BBC, he nevertheless secured a generous licence fee settlement in response to a rigorous internal programme of cost-cutting and reorganisation, which demonstrated to politicians that the BBC had shed its over- managed wasteful ways. However, in ‘delivering’ as strategist, steward and geek, Birt was perceived as harming the creative fabric of the BBC, and even today he is blamed by some in the organisation for damaging its unique culture.
 
Greg Dyke (2000–2004)
Dyke focused on one leadership role, the creative hero, and, as discussed earlier in this chapter, did this so successfully that he made it into management textbooks as an exemplary transformational leader. He sought to make the BBC the most creative media organisation in the world (and he was able to do this thanks to the generous licence fee settlement negotiated by his predecessor, John Birt). In addition, he was a clever strategist, combining his knowledge of media and of digital technology to launch a successful digital terrestrial television venture, Freeview. Overall, Dyke put proportionately less emphasis on the corporate steward role. He was impatient with complex management procedures and favoured a delegated leadership style. As discussed earlier in this chapter, a serious conflict with the government over the BBC’s coverage of the government’s case-building for UK involvement in the Iraq war eventually led to Dyke’s resignation, and the subsequent Hutton Inquiry found fault with the BBC’s management and editorial systems.
 
Mark Thompson (2004–2012)
Thompson appears unusually to have mastered all dimensions of the leadership role. As a strategist and as a geek, he showed that he understood the digital imperative, building on Birt’s and Dyke’s digital legacies, while at the same time fostering and emphasising creativity inside the corporation. Since his departure, however, controversies about written-off spending on technology projects and generous senior staff pay-outs suggest that he may either have given too little attention to the role of corporate steward, or have failed to emphasise enough publicly his understanding of the importance of this dimension of the role.
 

 
The art of the elegant exit – knowing when to go

The curse of the mogul is that while moguls’ careers invariably begin with a great insight that creates value for shareholders, they somehow lose the thread of what the actual source of that initial value creation was. (Knee, Greenwald and Seave, 2009: 267)

George Entwistle did not manage an elegant exit from the BBC. The ability to make graceful exit might be described as the ultimate leadership skill. The issue of
leadership departure has been exhaustively studied, but diversity in terms of esearch contexts, methodologies, basic definitions and research fields make it hard to draw general conclusions from this work for strategy in the media sector.

Some of the most insightful findings come from derailment studies conducted by the Centre for Creative Leadership in the 1970s and 1980s. These identified four main auses for general managers’ exits (Van Velsor and Brittain Leslie, 1995). The first is problems with interpersonal relationships, often arising from a failure to transition from the task-based leadership approach required in previous roles to a elationship-based one needed for general management. Failure to meet business bjectives because environmental conditions have become more dynamic and omplex is the second reason. Again, this stems from failing to transition from one leadership context to another. Failure to build and lead a team is the third issue.
This arises from difficulties in shifting from a task-orientated, assertive approach t participative and relational one. The final hurdle concerns an inability to adapt to hanges in the marketplace or the organisational culture.

Leaving a good successor is part of the exit task. The findings of research into leadership succession are contradictory (Virany et al., 1992), perhaps due to
ethodological problems concerned with measuring leader effects (Yukl, 2002).
Executive succession is a powerful means of correcting misalignments between an rganisation and its environment (Virany et al., 1992), and a change of leadership i ften required in mature and potentially declining organisations (Schein, 1992).
Failing firms have lower rates of succession than non-failing firms (Schwartz and Menon, 1985). Such failures can stem from incumbent leaders’ difficulties in hanging established patterns (Bettman and Weitz, 1983).

Entrepreneurs and founders (both are prevalent in the media sector) have particular difficulty in giving up what they have created: they may be consciously grooming uccessors, but unconsciously seeking to prevent powerful and competent people
 
from taking over, or they may designate successors but prevent them from having nough responsibility to learn how to do the job (Schein, 1992). Recent events at News Corporation and Viacom suggest that Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone
ay be experiencing conflicts in these areas.
 
Conclusions
Leadership in the media is an under-researched field. Leadership theory is xtensive but, because it is disjointed, it is hard to apply systematically to the ector. This chapter therefore needs to be viewed in the spirit of seeking to capture
the current state of knowledge and giving impulses for further research.

It does, however, underline the close link that inevitably exists between leadership nd strategy, and the relevance of this interrelationship for the media industry. It uggests that the media leadership role encompasses three different spheres: the uter, strategic environment which provides a starting point for strategy; the inner nvironment, the organisational eco-system comprising the many different rganisational phenomena – particularly the interpretative ones – which must be brought into alignment if a strategy is to be implemented; and the internal elationship with the self – the ability to reflect and learn and to connect with
thers. It also highlights the range of ‘sub-roles’ contained in the media leadership task (or the number of leadership hats that must be worn at once) and the strategies that can be employed to pull off this extremely challenging requirement.

The examples in this chapter also underline the context-dependent nature of the leadership task in the media. Eisner offers perhaps the cruellest example since he
as in many ways a victim of his own success. During the first 10 years of his tenure his entrepreneurial, detail-driven leadership fitted excellently to the nature f the management challenge and harmonised with the abilities of his leadership
olleagues, and allowed him to transform a failing collection of media assets into a highly successful and complex media conglomerate. However, his success in this hanged the leadership challenge at the same time that he lost his co-leaders. The rganisation he created was too complex to be micro-managed, too diverse for a ingle management approach. His risk aversion and preference for internal growth
ere disadvantages in a converging industry where the blockbuster model was becoming the norm. The tight divisional coordination he championed maximised fficiency and return on investments but depressed creativity.

Finally, the chapter also shows that the task of leadership in the media sector ontains many inherent paradoxes: the span of competencies and talents required is best served by multi-leader structures, yet these clearly complicate the decision-
aking process; the intricacies of the environment mandates that leaders develop heuristics to reduce complexity, but these can also limit strategic options when that nvironment changes too dramatically; the power, influence and responsibility
ake huge requirements in terms of self-knowledge and emotional maturity, yet individuals possessing such characteristics are unlikely to be able to stomach the temperamental, ego-driven, hard-nosed, power-hungry individuals that populate the
 
ector. Paradoxes such as these are one of the subjects covered in the next chapter, hich seeks to identify common themes and issues from the ideas presented in the
book so far for researchers, students and practitioners.