Our Turn (5 page)

Figuring Out When to Fold

KNOWING WHEN TO LEAVE A JOB
can be as pivotal to career success as knowing when to take one. By the late nineties, that time had come for me at Paragon. Major changes were under way in the broadcast industry that would also change the distribution business. For years we'd been selling shows to a growing and hungry roster of international broadcasters. But as those networks matured, they saw increasing value in creating, not renting, the programs they aired. The days of selling a movie-of-the-week to multiple networks for millions of dollars were ending. This was most obvious to me on a trip to a broadcast festival in Cannes where I had two networks in Germany bidding fiercely for a TV movie starring
General Hospital
soap star Jack Wagner. The competition was driving up the price considerably, when, literally overnight, one of the networks withdrew its offer. When I asked why, I learned that my two vying networks had just merged. The bidding war was over. Consolidating would not only allow them to acquire
that movie for less, it would give them a better shot at creating their own content.

The penny dropped hard for me. I didn't want to stay on the side of selling programming to networks. I wanted to build a network that made and commissioned its own programming. At the same time, the principals at Paragon were running into financial trouble over losing bets they'd made on feature films. They'd taken to drawing on the profits from the distribution division so that my division's bills were suddenly going unpaid. I didn't like the outlook for the future.

When a headhunter contacted me about becoming general manager and vice-president of programming at Trio/Newsworld International, a US cable channel that reached thirty million American homes, I didn't hesitate—even though it meant leaving behind my “president” title. Earlier that year, I'd given birth to my first child, and Paragon's CEO, concerned that my departure might say too much about the overall health of the company, told people I was leaving because I wanted to “take it easy” since becoming a mother. I made it my business to let him and my contacts know that slowing down had nothing to do with it. I was leaving for a better professional opportunity.

The content at Trio had been built to appeal to Canadian expats in the United States with a lineup of all-Canadian shows, like
Traders
and
The Littlest Hobo
. But its owners, the Desmarais family of Power Corporation, realized the independent channel could no longer stand alone in a sea of ever-greater consolidation among broadcasters. They intended to fix it up to sell it, revamping the network's programming to increase its popularity and profitability in order to make it more attractive to
potential buyers. In other words, if I did my job well, eventually I wouldn't have one. Trio would be sold. But, to me, gaining the experience of reinventing and rebranding a network made the move worthwhile. (And Paragon went into receivership six months after I left.)

To boost its value, I figured Trio had to break away from running only Canadian shows, so I set a plan in motion to transform it by infusing it with international shows that would appeal to the viewer curious about the world around them. (This was before people could find everything from everywhere online.) Picking up movie packages and original dramas from around the world, such as
Cracker
with Robbie Coltrane from the UK and the
Rebus
detective series featuring Scotland's John Hannah, I grew the network's worth and profile within a year. Big players came calling, including Disney and NBC. By 2000, the transformation landed Power Corp a handsome sale of the channel to USA Networks for US$155 million. The Desmarais family was so happy with the deal that they gave everyone who had worked at the company a DVD player, an expensive gift at the time. They wanted to fly me from Toronto to their head office in Montreal for a dinner in order to present my gift to me in person. I was nearly eight months pregnant with my second child and I tried to decline. They wouldn't hear of it, and so I went, waddling, and after the dinner they took me aside and handed me an envelope. Inside was a cheque, for more money than I had ever seen in one lump. It wasn't part of my contract (I didn't have one) or my compensation, but a thank-you for a job well done. Their generosity touched me deeply and taught me a great deal about the importance of
respecting the people who work for you, and showing how much you appreciate their contributions, just as I had learned from Isme Bennie the value of rewarding initiative.

Risky Business

THE JOB PROSPECTS FOR ME
in Canada after leaving Trio were grim. Canadian cable networks had yet to take off and there was little demand for my particular brand of programming expertise. I had no choice but to cast a wide net. The new owners of Trio had mentioned the possibility of a broadcasting job in New York, but with a toddler and a newborn, and a husband who had just finished teachers' college, the idea of putting in long hours in Manhattan didn't make sense for us. But then a headhunter told me about a major job opportunity in Denver that sounded close to perfect, if slightly intimidating. The job would put me in charge of programming at Hallmark Entertainment, which had seventeen channels and an international audience of fifty million viewers. I was nervous about moving to a new country, the biggest entertainment pond on the planet, with two babies in tow. There were plenty of reasons to find a more comfortable arrangement to curl up with. But Denver struck me as family friendly, and the opportunity to gain experience in the international cable market and expand the skill set I had been growing for a decade outweighed my apprehension. And I wasn't wrong.

At Trio, I had a clear mandate to broaden the audience base and shake up the status quo. At Hallmark, my role was essentially mine to create. When I arrived in Denver, the networks' schedules were geared toward airing the shows
in the Hallmark Hall of Fame Library, a rich repository of programs and television movies stretching back to the 1950s. But the lineups tended to have little to do with the interests of its international audience. In fact, a recent Employee of the Month had been lauded for finding a way to maximize the number of times a show could be broadcast by using a program that worked out the run dates and spaced out the repeats. It was called a “schedulizer,” and was designed to benefit the company as rights holder over the viewer. The audience didn't factor into it at all. The
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
just doesn't mean much to people watching in Australia or Japan, for instance. But no one wants to hear, especially from the new boss, that they are pursuing the wrong definition of success and serving the company's narrowest interest.

So I told these employees that their approach was important in maximizing the benefits from the rights we held, but I suggested that they could create a bigger business picture by serving, even potentially building, audiences where we had them. I commissioned research to understand our viewer base, research that informed the way we redesigned our schedule. There would be no more one-schedule-fits-all and no more being only a movie channel. We picked up the broadcast rights to
Star Trek
in Asia, where research showed audiences were keen on the old-school sci-fi series. For women in Latin America, who reported that they often watched television while they did household chores like ironing, we featured the emotional dramas they said they enjoyed.

Every tweak to the lineup represented a departure from what the company had been doing—and a risk. But they'd
hired me, an outsider, which indicated that management was ready to take risks.

By its nature, television is all about taking risks: you select a show and invest in its development and have no real idea if it will succeed until after it goes to air. Since many shows do fail, you have to live in that space that drives accountants crazy. They always want to know how many will fail—two shows out of ten? Five out of ten? By contrast, as the person in charge, I had to allow for the possibility of failure. If you never fail it means you are never trying anything new. Success means you've made more right decisions than wrong ones, but you can't let failure define you. Making a big generalization here, but Canadians tend to be risk-averse, too worried that we are only as good as the last thing we did. Whereas in the States, the emphasis was not on what you'd done that had worked or failed, but what you were going to do next. At Hallmark, I learned to be less intimidated by failure, because failure was not cast in the same devastating light as it was back home.

Over three and a half years, we built a wide and diverse international audience, which made Hallmark Entertainment yet another attractive property, and eventually, it was sold. But even before that happened, I knew it was time to go home. It was just after 9/11, which had deeply affected my colleagues, and not only in our New York office. My oldest daughter was just about to start grade school and I was tired of not getting to eat Shreddies. But with every job that followed, I carried a little bit of that American-daring sensibility with me. In 2003, when I became the senior vice-president of programming for the Alliance Atlantis specialty channels, the experience I'd
gleaned at Hallmark allowed me to do what I felt needed to be done, and that meant shaking things up.

The job involved responsibility for programming the broadcaster's lifestyle channels, which were in need of renovation. A lot of the shows were of the strictly instructional variety: how to plan a party, set the dinner table, plant begonias. But as I'd already seen in the US, reality-based shows that told a story as they imparted information were gaining real traction with audiences keen not only to learn, but to learn while being entertained. Tastes were changing and we needed to get ahead of the audience. Not long after I arrived, I heard a pitch from the team for a show from a contractor named Mike Holmes that seemed to fit this bill perfectly. At the time, Mike had been featured on CTV doing lunchtime news break how-to segments. But he saw potential in recasting himself as a kind of vigilante contractor, the big guy who comes in to nail the crooked contractor who wrecked your home with shoddy installation or substandard plumbing that flooded your basement.

I was intrigued by the drama he was selling. For most people, their homes are the biggest—perhaps the only—investment they'll ever make. Then someone comes along and takes advantage of their efforts to make improvements and puts their greatest asset at risk. This was real-life drama. If Holmes could rescue them from that fate, he was more like a white knight than a vigilante. That tweak to the concept made
Holmes on Homes
something unique in the home-improvement genre, a show that wouldn't just demonstrate how to repair a broken tile, but would tug at viewers' hearts.

The team was nervous. Personality-driven narrative was a risky venture. Building a whole show around a relatively unknown guy was not a safe bet. And building a show around one person whose name was in the title was asking for it. What if viewers didn't like Mike Holmes? The show would die. If we pulled it off, he'd become a celebrity and could leave the network for the big time someplace else. Building him into a star would give him power the networks were reluctant to share. Talent was considered safest when it remained nameless and faceless, and therefore interchangeable. But not taking this risk meant passing up on the potential of great reward. As I had learned, sharing power and investing it in others comes back with big dividends.

I decided that Mike Holmes needed to be front and centre. And who would pass up a title like
Holmes on Homes
? No one else on TV looked like him—this big strapping man with a buzz cut and overalls. Mike had the perfect look to play a white-knight character, and I was sure the show would be a hit; the possibility that its popularity would ultimately cost us Holmes sounded like a short-sighted reason not to try. If we cultivated a trusting relationship and committed to supporting Holmes's development, he'd have every reason to stay. In the end, it was my call and my risk to take, and I took it, knowing I had spotted “it” in Mike Holmes and I didn't want to let it get away.

There's been a sea of ink spilled on the way leaders, and women in particular, regard risk-taking. Most of it has cast women as being almost biologically risk-averse, genetically driven to cautiously mind the cave and pick berries with babes
strapped to our backs. According to the evolutionary stereotypes, we weren't out hunting and confronting death at every turn, so what do we know from risk? It's a bias about the real nature of women that media and popular culture have spun into the contemporary workplace. Some studies have even considered whether the global financial crisis of 2008 could have been averted if more women than cowboys had been in charge. But there's real danger in putting stock in prehistoric depictions that suggest women, by nature, are prone to play it safe, because the characterization can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hard fact is that females are socialized to be restrained. Even before girls go to preschool, they've ingested the cultural expectation that good girls sit still and behave, and they're rewarded when they do just that. This is why so many girls are at the head of the class.

But in the business world, that mode of the behaviour is the ball and chain we have to sever to succeed. And there is lots of evidence that we're making that break. The trouble is that for too long the very term “risk” has been defined in masculine terms, both physical and financial, as though risk-taking is simply about going brave with biceps and piles of cash. But in the workplace, a risk is any situation that carries the potential for negative consequences. Any time I changed a program lineup, altered a schedule or chose to invest in a new show, I was taking a risk, especially if there was opposition. The risk was not just that ratings would suffer if I made the wrong decision, but that my credibility as a leader was on the line. Failure in my job was public.