There's one important rule that every CEO has to remember to be successful. When Ken Stern came to NPR in 1999 as it's chief operating officer, he had a few pretty good ideas in mind. He helped create a $300 million endowment and double the weekly audience to 26 million listeners. Not a bad day's work by anyone standards. As CEO, however, he recently tried to take NPR in a direction its member stations weren't ready for...and he paid for it.
When Wal-Mart squeezes it's suppliers to provide cheaper products, it succeeds because its suppliers know Wal-Mart is their biggest client, by far, and there's not much they can do about it. Ken Stern did the same - perhaps unintentionally - to his member stations by suggesting NPR focus on expanding operations into other forms of media such as iphones. The all-important difference being that these stations aren't just NPR's suppliers, their NPR's "stockholders." Stern's plan did little to convince those member stations that they wouldn't be left out in the cold. And the #1 rule in business is that you don't screw your stockholders.
In the end, Stern tried to play a win-lose game and his "stockholders" and lost. It wasn't that he didn't have great ideas or that he wasn't right about other forms of media taking the traditional radio audience away from NPR. No, he was a numbers guy and just didn't have the chops to bring the NPR family together. We're not too worried about Mr. Stern, though. Before long, he'll be heading up some media consulting firm in the private sector, making ten times as much, and laughing all the way to the bank.
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