IP Democracy: Can Digital Entrepreneurs Last at Media Giants?

The New York Times’ Richard Siklos has this piece today about the seeming trend among traditional media companies to dump their digital visionaries. Jonathan Miller’s out at Time Warner, Ross Levinsohn has left the building at News Corp. and Larry Kramer has left CBS.

Of these, only Kramer is bona fide entrepreneur, having built and sold MarketWatch to CBS. But Miller and Levinsohn have entrepreneurial spirits — they wanted to create something new and succeeded at their respective companies.

Siklos, however, isn’t looking at the personnel changes quite this way. He had hoped to divine some kind of “archetypal digital genius” from the recent round of executive musical chairs at major media companies. What he came up with is “old operational guy” (Randy Falco, who’s replacing Miller), “web star” (Mika Salmi, now of MTV Networks but founder of Atom Entertainment, and a bona fide entrepreneur from the dot.com days) and “general corporate athlete” (Beth Comstock of NBC Universal.)

But it’s obvious to me that one of the biggest challenges in hiring a digital genius is the nature of the corporation itself. Visionaries that make changes — unless they’re at the top of the corporate ladder — are anathema to big companies, which develop their own bureaucracies, their own cultures and their own way of doing things that get knocked out of whack when someone like Levinsohn or Kramer comes in and mixes things up.

Sooner or later the institutional forces — most often in the form of scheming rival executives jealous of the spotlight cast on the innovators — will sabotage even the most talented entrpreneur. It’s cool so long as Levinsohn or Miller or Kramer are actually doing things that will build new businesses for the company. But once those businesses are built, it’s bye-bye visionary.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 26, 2006 8:46 AM to IP Democracy