The Ride of a Lifetime Read online

  He was also the first person I ever worked for who embraced technological advancements to revolutionize what we did and how we did it. Reverse-angle cameras, slow-motion replays, airing events live via satellite—that’s all Roone. He wanted to try every new gadget and break every stale format. He was looking, always, for new ways to connect to viewers and grab their attention. Roone taught me the dictum that has guided me in every job I’ve held since: Innovate or die, and there’s no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.

  He was also a relentless perfectionist. In my early years in Sports, I spent most of my weekends in a basement control room on Sixty-sixth Street. My job entailed taking in feeds from all over the world and delivering them to producers and editors, who would cut them and lay in voiceovers before they went to air. Roone would often show up in the control room, or if he didn’t appear in person, he’d call in from wherever he was. (There was a red “Roone phone” in each of our control rooms, as well as in the mobile units at every event we covered.) If he was at home watching a broadcast—he was always watching from somewhere—and saw something he didn’t like, he’d call in and tell us. This camera angle is wrong. That story line needs more emphasis. We’re not telling people what’s coming up!

  No detail was too small for Roone. Perfection was the result of getting all the little things right. On countless occasions, just as I’d witnessed at the Sinatra concert, he would rip up an entire program before it aired and demand the team rework the whole thing, even if it meant working till dawn in an editing room. He wasn’t a yeller, but he was tough and exacting and he communicated in very clear terms what was wrong and that he expected it to get fixed, and he didn’t much care what sacrifice it required to fix it. The show was the thing. It was everything to him. The show was more important to Roone than to the people who made it, and you had to make peace with that if you worked for him. His commitment to making things great was galvanizing. It was often exhausting, often frustrating (largely because he would wait until very late in the production process to give notes or demand changes), but it was inspiring, too, and the inspiration far outweighed the frustration. You knew how much he cared about making things great, and you simply wanted to live up to his expectations.

  His mantra was simple: “Do what you need to do to make it better.” Of all the things I learned from Roone, this is what shaped me the most. When I talk about this particular quality of leadership, I refer to it as “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” In practice that means a lot of things, and it’s hard to define. It’s a mindset, really, more than a specific set of rules. It’s not, at least as I have internalized it, about perfectionism at all costs (something Roone wasn’t especially concerned about). Instead, it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity. You instinctively push back against the urge to say There’s not enough time, or I don’t have the energy, or This requires a difficult conversation I don’t want to have, or any of the many other ways we can convince ourselves that “good enough” is good enough.

  Decades after I stopped working for Roone, I watched a documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about a master sushi chef from Tokyo named Jiro Ono, whose restaurant has three Michelin stars and is one of the most sought-after reservations in the world. In the film, he’s in his late eighties and still trying to perfect his art. He is described by some as being the living embodiment of the Japanese word shokunin, which is “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.” I fell in love with Jiro when I watched it and became fascinated by the concept of shokunin. In 2013, I traveled to Tokyo for work and went to the restaurant with some colleagues. We met Jiro, who made us our dinner, and I watched in awe as he deftly laid out nineteen gorgeous pieces of sushi, one after the other, over the course of thirty-five minutes. (The speed of the meal was due to his commitment to serve the sushi on rice that was at body temperature. If the meal took too long, the rice would drop a couple of degrees below 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which to Jiro was unacceptable.)

  I loved the documentary so much that I showed excerpts of it to 250 executives at a Disney retreat. I wanted them to understand better, through the example of Jiro, what I meant when I talked about “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” This is what it looks like to take immense personal pride in the work you create, and to have both the instinct toward perfection and the work ethic to follow through on that instinct.

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  ONE OF MY favorite interactions with Roone came at the beginning of my tenure at ABC Sports. Even though we worked on the same floor and Sports was a relatively small division, Roone never came across as accessible to me in those days. Other than perfunctory hellos, he barely acknowledged me. One day I found myself standing next to him at a urinal. To my surprise, Roone began to talk with me. “How’s it going?”

  After a moment of stunned silence, I said, “Well, some days I feel like it’s tough just keeping my head above water.”

  Roone looked straight ahead. Without missing a beat, he said, “Get a longer snorkel.” Then he finished his business and walked out.

  He wasn’t much for excuses. Only later, when I worked more closely with him, would I discover what people meant when they said that he refused to accept no for an answer. If he asked you to do something, you were expected to exhaust every possible method to accomplish it. If you came back and said you tried and it couldn’t be done, he’d just tell you, “Find another way.”

  In 1979, the World Table Tennis Championships were being held in Pyongyang, North Korea. Roone called me into his office one day and said, “This is going to be interesting. Let’s cover it on Wide World of Sports.” I thought he was joking. He surely knew it would be impossible to secure the rights to an event in North Korea.

  He wasn’t joking.

  I then embarked on a worldwide pursuit to secure the rights. The first stop was Cardiff, Wales, to meet with the head of the World Table Tennis Federation, and then from there, since I wasn’t allowed to travel to North Korea, to Beijing to meet with the North Korean contingent. After a few months of intense negotiations, we were on the eve of closing the deal when I received a call from someone on the Asian desk in the U.S. State Department. “Everything you’re doing with them is illegal,” he said. “You’re in violation of strict U.S. sanctions against doing any business with North Korea.”

  That certainly seemed like the end of the road, but I also had Roone in my mind, telling me to find another way. It turned out that the State Department wasn’t opposed to our entering North Korea; they actually liked the idea of our going in with cameras and capturing what images we could there. They just wouldn’t allow us to pay the North Koreans for the rights or enter into any contract with them. When I explained this to the North Korean contingent, they were livid, and it appeared that the whole thing would collapse. I eventually arrived at a workaround that involved securing the rights not through the host country but through the World Table Tennis Federation. The North Korean government, though we were no longer paying them, still agreed to let us in, and we became the first U.S. media team to enter North Korea in decades—a historic moment in sports broadcasting. Roone never knew the lengths I’d gone to to get it done, but I know I wouldn’t have done it had I not been driven in part by his expectations and my desire to please him.

  It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them. Most of us who worked for Roone wanted to live up to his standards, but we also knew that he had no patience for excuses and that he could easily turn on anyone, in his singularly cutting, somewhat cruel, way, if he felt we weren’t performing to his satisfaction.

  Every Monday morning, the top executives in Sports would gather around a conference table to review the past weekend’s coverage and plan for what was coming up. The rest of us sat in a ring of chairs around the outer edge of the
room, true backbenchers, waiting for critiques of the work we’d just completed and orders for the week ahead.

  One morning—this was early in my time at Wide World of Sports, right around the time of the snorkel exchange—Roone walked in and began excoriating the entire team for missing a world record for the mile set by the great British middle-distance runner, Sebastian Coe, at a track-and-field event in Oslo, Norway. We were normally on top of such things, but there were unexpected complications in this case, and I hadn’t been able to procure the rights to the race in time to air it. I suspected it was going to be a problem come Monday, but I held on to an unrealistic hope that it might slip by without mention.

  No such luck. Roone looked around the table at his senior team, wanting to know who was at fault. From the outer edges of the room, I raised my hand and said that it was my mistake. The room went silent; two dozen heads turned toward me. Nobody said anything, and we moved on, but after the meeting, various people came up to me and murmured, “I can’t believe you did that.”

  “Did what?”

  “Admitted it was your fault.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No one ever does that.”

  Roone never said anything to me about it, but he treated me differently, with higher regard, it seemed, from that moment on. In my early days, I thought there was only one lesson in this story, the obvious one about the importance of taking responsibility when you screw up. That’s true, and it’s significant. In your work, in your life, you’ll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you honestly own up to your mistakes. It’s impossible not to make them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from them, and set an example that it’s okay to get things wrong sometimes. What’s not okay is to undermine others by lying about something or covering your own ass first.

  There’s a related lesson, though, that I only came to fully appreciate years later, when I was in a position of real leadership. It’s so simple that you might think it doesn’t warrant mentioning, but it’s surprisingly rare: Be decent to people. Treat everyone with fairness and empathy. This doesn’t mean that you lower your expectations or convey the message that mistakes don’t matter. It means that you create an environment where people know you’ll hear them out, that you’re emotionally consistent and fair-minded, and that they’ll be given second chances for honest mistakes. (If they don’t own up to their mistakes, or if they blame someone else, or if the mistake is the result of some unethical behavior, that’s a different story, and something that shouldn’t be tolerated.)

  There were people at ABC Sports who lived in fear of Roone turning on them, and as a result, they avoided taking risks or sticking their necks out too far. I never felt that way, but I could see it in others, and I understood where it came from. He was a capricious boss, and over time capriciousness takes a huge toll on a staff’s morale. One day he would make you feel like you were the most important person in the division; the next he would deliver withering criticism or would put a knife in your back for reasons that were never quite clear. He had a way of playing people off each other, and I could never tell if it was a purposeful strategy or a function of his personality. For all of his immense talent and success, Roone was insecure at heart, and the way he defended against his own insecurity was to foster it in the people around him. Oftentimes it worked, in its way, and made you work that much harder to please him, but there were times when he drove me so crazy I was sure I was going to quit. I wasn’t alone in thinking this.

  I didn’t quit, though. I was able to make peace with the way Roone exercised his authority, to be motivated by the good and not be too personally wounded by the bad. I was naturally resilient, I think, and working for Roone made me more so. And I prided myself on working hard, especially in a place where so many of the people around me were better educated and from more sophisticated backgrounds. It was important to me to know that when it came down to it, I could outwork anyone else, and so I was focused much more on that than I was on the vicissitudes of Roone’s moods.

  It was only later, looking back, that I realized that so much of what we accomplished didn’t have to come at such a cost. I was motivated by Roone’s drive for perfection and have carried it with me ever since. But I learned something else along the way, too: Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I wouldn’t have articulated it that way at the time. Mostly I was just focused on doing my job well and certainly wasn’t thinking about what I’d do differently if I were in Roone’s shoes. But years later, when I was given the chance to lead, I was instinctively aware of both the need to strive for perfection and the pitfalls of caring only about the product and never the people.

  CHAPTER 2

  BETTING ON TALENT

  IN MARCH 1985, I was thirty-four years old and had just been made vice president at ABC Sports, when Leonard Goldenson, ABC’s founder, chairman, and CEO, agreed to sell the corporation to a much smaller company, Capital Cities Communications. Cap Cities, as they were called, was a quarter the size of ABC, and they bought us for $3.5 billion. Everyone at ABC was blindsided by the announcement. How could a company like Cap Cities suddenly own a major television network? Who were these guys? How did this happen?

  These guys were Tom Murphy and Dan Burke. Over the years, they’d built Cap Cities, starting a small television station in Albany, New York, acquisition by acquisition. With help from Tom’s close friend Warren Buffett, who backed the $3.5 billion deal, they were able to swallow our much larger company. (As Tom Murphy put it, they were “the minnow that ate the whale.”)

  Tom and Dan weren’t from our world. In our eyes, they were small-time. They owned local TV and radio stations, a sprawling publishing business, including some midsize newspapers. They were church-going Catholics (their New York office was in a building on Madison Avenue owned by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York) with no network experience, no connection to Hollywood, and a reputation for drastic penny-pinching. We had no idea what was going to happen when they took over, but we knew that nothing we were used to would remain the same.

  The deal closed in January 1986. Shortly afterward, Tom and Dan held a corporate retreat in Phoenix. I didn’t rank high enough to get invited, but I heard plenty of complaints and snickering from other ABC execs in the aftermath, about corny team-building exercises and Tom and Dan’s homespun values. I’d later realize we were all being cynics and snobs. Over the next few years, those corny traditions would help form a genuine camaraderie within the company. And Tom and Dan’s allergies to Hollywood didn’t mean they were unsophisticated, as a lot of executives at ABC assumed early on. It was just who they were: no-nonsense businesspeople who focused on the work and had zero interest in the glitz.

  It was true, though, that running a huge entertainment company was like nothing they’d done before. For one thing, they had never managed world-class executive talent. Nowhere was this more evident than in their relationship with Roone. By the time Cap Cities acquired us, Roone was running both Sports and ABC News, which he’d taken over in 1977, when it was in the ratings tank. He’d transformed it as he had Sports, by putting his most high-profile anchors—Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel, and Diane Sawyer—on a pedestal and using them across a range of shows. He created 20/20 and World News Tonight, then Nightline, which grew out of ABC’s coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis. He brought the same relentless competitive spirit and striking visual sensibility to news coverage as he had to sports broadcasting, and the division thrived under him.

  Tom and Dan respected Roone, and they were well aware of his talent and reputation, but they were also a little intimidated by him. He spoke a language and moved in a world they weren’t familiar with, and Roone leveraged that to his advantage. He was aloof and sometimes openly critical of them. He’d show up late for meetings or would at times blatantly disregard some policy issued by the “bean counters,” as he saw them. I was on
e of the last of the old guard from Sports still around in those days, and Roone often commiserated with me. I’d get a call from his assistant at the end of the day, asking me to come over to News, and when I arrived, Roone would pull out a bottle of a white Italian wine that he loved. We’d sit in his office, surrounded by Emmy awards, while he griped about how Tom and Dan were crimping his style. “They don’t get it,” he’d say. “You can’t save your way to success.”

  Roone believed in sparing no expense in the pursuit of greatness, and he didn’t want anyone telling him he had to change the way he did things to meet some arbitrary budgetary goals. He didn’t care about the business side of things, but if pressed, he could always point to the revenue we’d brought in over the years and say that the profligate spending allowed us not just to make amazing television but to create an aura of sophistication and glamour that advertisers wanted to be a part of.

  That wasn’t how Tom and Dan worked. They came in and immediately stripped away all the perks we’d grown used to. No more limos lined up in front of ABC headquarters waiting for executives. No more trips on the Concorde or first-class travel. No more bottomless expense accounts. They saw how our business was changing in a way a lot of people at ABC didn’t want to accept. Margins were getting tighter; competition was tougher. Within our own company, even, ESPN was beginning to find its footing, which eventually would have a direct impact on ABC Sports.

  Tom and Dan weren’t just meat-and-potatoes guys who didn’t “get it.” They were shrewd businesspeople who sensed which way the winds were blowing. (It also should be said that when they felt it was important to spend money, they did. Roone benefited from that more than anyone when they gave him the go-ahead to woo Diane Sawyer from CBS and David Brinkley from NBC to round out the all-star team at ABC News.)