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As CEO of Sony USA, he's feeling the full effects of digital disruption in the media biz, according to Tina Brown/WDCPost.
Grasping at broadcast flags:
Note that Valenti has said there may be new release movies available over the internet by 2005.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Where are you?
Barry Diller is one of the few who seems to have accepted this and is trying to work with the properties of digital media, not against them:
Brown's conclusion: power is a hologram.
The Slough of Uncertainty
By Tina Brown
Thursday, November 20, 2003; Page C01
It's not just in Iraq that we don't know who the enemy is. At the Foursquare conference for media big shots hosted by Steve Rattner's Quadrangle investment banking boutique at the Regent Wall Street hotel this month, the mood can be summarized as the Fog of War.
The economy is not the only fear factor anymore. The new angst among these moguls is much more a sense of being blindfolded, getting punk'd, standing on quicksand.
"Every day is Halloween," the CEO of Sony USA, Howard Stringer, told me. "Between the combination of more information than you can possibly cope with and global markets stealing your employees and price erosion happening faster than you can develop new products, you can't tell a mask from a reality."
In the TV world, executives are in denial about eyeballs swiveling to cable, Internet and video games. They're blaming Nielsen, the Delphic oracle of the ratings, for mislaying a chunk of young Hispanic men in the abysmal ratings for the fall season.
Movie executives and producers are in a funk about working in a medium that's a blip on the radar screens of the multinational corporations that own the studios. "The decision-making process is so diffused among layers, power in Hollywood these days is a hologram," says Brian Grazer, producer of hits such as "A Beautiful Mind" as well as co-chairman of Imagine Entertainment, whose corporate partner, Universal, has had three overlords in three years and now has to learn a new cast of characters at General Electric's NBC.
Music executives feel like the dinosaurs after the asteroid impact. Their piracy problem is so intractable they're almost nostalgic for Napster. They still can't figure out how to fight illegal downloading without making enemies of the kids who ought to be their best customers.
"The times are so radical it produces insecurity," said Barry Diller, who has mostly exited the old media terrain to build his InterActiveCorp empire. "No one has yet grasped the consequences of going from analog life to digital life. It piles on incredible pressure. It's not about growing new plumage any more. It's about growing gills."
The corporate executives who preside over these empires are questioning all the rules they've lived by. Bigness, for instance. For CEOs, bigness turns out to mean that they have to spend their days managing downward -- communicating with increasingly remote and baffled employees, trying to explain why certain decisions haven't been made.
In the era of Internet blogs, all memos are leaked, which only adds to executive insecurity. Businesses today swim in a rancid scum of aired feelings. One lone guy at a PC keyboard loosed the right-wing Web warriors who brought mighty CBS to its knees over the Reagan miniseries. CEOs can no longer kid themselves they are admired and fearless leaders -- and if they cherish any such delusions, a visit to the company chat room will quickly cure them. Their own e-mails are a problem, too. E-mail traffics in top-of-the-head responses that are eventually seized by Eliot Spitzer. "Power isn't fun anymore," one financial services honcho told me at a function the other night. "You can't do anything by fiat."
It's a guerrilla society now and you're headed for the scrap heap if you fight by the old rules. Howard Dean understands that. He keeps making up new ones with his viral approach to politics on the Internet.
In a world where everything is amorphous, the biggest hunger is for focus, for tangibles to vent against. It was kind of a relief to beat up on Dean for his tin-eared but innocent comment about voters with Confederate flag decals on their pickups.
It was a relief to have the prime minister of Malaysia to beat up on for his odious anti-Semitic ramblings because it allows us to put an address on a poison that's growing, seeping, spreading on Web sites, talk shows and Arab madrassas. Perhaps a hunger for tangibles is the reason why politically polarized books are riding the bestseller list. It's a comfort to make punching bags out of oversimplified ideological positions.
Media big shots and campaigning politicians do not exactly constitute a humanitarian emergency. But the sense of living in quicksand goes beyond their concerns. Human Rights Watch activists complain of the same thing.
When the organization was set up 25 years ago, it dedicated itself to protecting the victims of totalitarian power from the abuses of the state. "Ironically, our problem now is not too much government but too little in the places we work in," Human Rights Watch Director Carroll Bogert told me. "How do you put pressure on the amorphous? So much of what we see is the state's inability to protect its own citizens. A local police force that is brutal without the endorsement of its own government. Rebels who kill and maim their own people. Civil war. There is no effective government to appeal to in horror shows like Somalia, Liberia or the Congo."
In this treacherous, marshy world the Bush administration comes over like the baffled leaders of the music industry. It still thinks it is living in the old big-suit world of "my football, my rules," where if "appropriate channels" won't sort out a problem, then war will. But this is a world where byzantine, slippery terror regimes send three-faced emissaries from the shadows for a London rendezvous with Richard Perle, and wars end without being over.
In Iraq the Governing Council is a chimera and we still don't know if it's al Qaeda or the Baathists bringing those helicopters down. The White House, too, is learning that power is a hologram.