Should corporate America be an opportunity for top executives to express themselves by living vicariously through the high lifestyles of subordinates, no matter how such high-styling costs shareholders? No matter how "beautiful" they are? The answer would seem to be "yes," if you're NBC chief Jeff Zucker and his boss, GE chief Jeff Immelt.
The high-living exec in question is NBC Entertainment chiefBen Silverman, who has lotsa sizzle, but not much steak. Sort of like MSNBC!
Richard Siklos, writing for Fortune, paints a devastating portrait of Silverman, who holds a mysterious grip on his job, despite poor performance.
OK, so Silverman is a flaky, quirky guy, who doesn't, for example, show up to meetings that he calls with the likes of Dick Wolf, the legendary TV producer. (Why would Wolf object to being stood up by Silverman? What has Wolf done to develop, maybe, a big ego, having only created a steady stream of hit TV shows and won a ton of awards?) But all of Silverman's managerial defects might be excused if his schtick was actually working. But here's Siklos:
The method has not, so far, produced hits. For the first few weeks of the new TV season, NBC was stuck in third place and had no entertainment programs ranked in the top 20 most-watched shows.
OK, that's not so good. But maybe Silverman is more interested in something else--the Ben Silverman show. And on that score, he's succeeding. Here's more from Siklos:
But if NBC's new shows haven't generated a lot of buzz, Silverman himself has, with a persona that seems equal measures Ferris Bueller and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. Last year he threw a bash in a rented mansion featuring a caged white tiger to greet guests. In meetings he has been known to pull out dinner chimes and play NBC's trademark three-note call sign when he hears something he likes.
Who couldn't like a guy like that? But wait, there's more:
He's a contributing editor to women's magazine Marie Claire who wears custom-made T-shirts emblazoned with "handpicked," one of his favorite words. He's not only like a character in HBO's Entourage, but recently performed a cameo on the show, playing himself. Silverman volunteers that one of his colleagues calls him "the Paris Hilton of NBC."
Got that? Silverman proclaims that he's been compared to Paris Hilton. Yikes, when that comparison got laid on Barack Obama last summer, it nearly cost him the election. Paris Hilton is glamorous and everything, but nobody wants her for her brain.
So why does Silverman survive? Siklos explains that he has solid support from his boss at NBC, Jeff Zucker. And why does Zucker like him so much? Check out Zucker's own explanation:
"Ben is one of those unique characters who attracts attention," says Zucker. "He's young, single, wealthy, and beautiful. There are a lot of reasons to be jealous of Ben before you even put him in this job."
Does it seem like maybe Zucker has a bit of a crush on Silverman? Well, yeah. "Beautiful"? "Jealous"? That's not the normal language of executive attaboying--that's the language of barely sublimated... well, you know. There doesn't seem to be a Mrs. Silverman, but what does Mrs. Zucker think?
Zucker is a corporate suit, but underneath all that conformity, he's also got a wild side, that only gets to come out occasionally. But when it does emerge, alas for Jeff, it gets slapped down fast. Here, for instance, is how super-blogger Nikki Finke, slapped down Zucker for his Cheeveresque--West Coast version--weirdness of Zucker, under the telling headline, "Has NBC Uni's Jeff Zucker Lost His Mind?"
You be the judge: I'm told this promo is supposed to air April 3rd before the return of NBC's My Name is Earl. In it, Jeff Zucker offers not just a recap of the show's fall season but also some zingers about issues left over from the writers’ strike. Worse, it shows him leering at Alyssa Milano's boobage and signing off as "JZ out...". I wish this were a hoax -- but it's real. At what point did NBC's "Must-See TV" degrade into "JZ TV"? UPDATE: NBC just confirmed to me that Zucker taped the intro "at the request of Earl's creator, Greg Garcia". And in response to my query, Garcia emails: "It was my idea. We had to do a recap of the show because we'd been off for so long, and I thought this would be a funny way to do it. The writers wrote the whole thing, I asked Jeff if he would do it, and he was cool enough to say yes. I loved the way it turned out, and I think it's fucking hilarious." Well, I bet it never airs:
And then there's the video, which can still be found on Finke's "Deadline Hollywood" site. So that's Jeff Zucker, folks, exposed in all his wild-side glory. Yes, he's married, yes, he has kids, yes, he works in a corner office at Rockefeller Center, and yes, most of the time he manages to restrain himself, confining his ambitions to corporate upward mobility. But at the same time, from her admittedly armchair analyst's chair, it seems to The Cable Gamer that there's a hidden side to Zucker, that he really wants is to be a bad--as in, ba-a-a-d. It's a free country, of course, but Zucker is badding around with the money of GE shareholders.
And on that score, here's some news: GE stock is down by almost three fourths in the last seven years.
That's a cold reality that's hard to spin away from. It's been a steady slide, in fact, since Jeff Immelt took over the company from Jack Welch back in 2001. The problem, of course, is that GE is a conglomerate, making everything jet engines to light bulbs to TV shows. And keeping track of all that requires serious work--the kind of work best done by drudges in suits. And in fact, Immelt is a suit.
But here's the rub: Like Zucker, Immelt has a secret wild side, too. Anybody can be a corporate chieftain, he thinks to himself; he wants to be seen as more. Immelt wants to be seen as thoughtful, and expressive, and creative. He wants to be hip and green and be pals with Obama & Co. So Immelt keeps MSNBC around, just so he can party with top liberal Democrats who will help him win puffy profiles in The New York Times.
That was the plan, at least. But in fact, it's hard to be a good CEO. It takes a full-time commitment--more than a full-time commitment, in fact. You can't dilletante your way to success, like Silverman. And you can't show undue favoritism toward such dilletantes, as seems to be the case for both Zucker and Immelt.
If you do, your corporate performance will suffer. Unless Zucker and Immelt want to devote themselves full time to rapping and liberal do-gooding, then they need to focus more on their actual jobs. And if they don't, well, TCG has been predicting for a long time that GE will be broken up soon.
Because if Benny & The Jeffs want to goof around, they will have some fun, well, they can. But if their pleasures come at the expense of GE's stock price, well, that's when the flame of fame flickers.
