He sure hopes so … In an interview conducted before news that Carl Icahn may be pulling back from his scorched-forest efforts to change Time Warner and his personal attacks on Richard Parsons, the chairman and CEO of Time Warner gave an interview as part of the Journal’s “Boss Talk” series. Read the whole thing for the real flavor of a chat with Parsons. Some highlights:
Icahn-Lazard Report: “The report was relatively bereft of anything new. Our reaction isn’t much different than the reaction of most of the people who encountered his weighty tome, which is that it is not a very impressive or compelling or persuasive piece of work.”
AOL: “But, hey, we held the business together. We grew the earnings. So AOL made $2 billion last year. This is not chump change. And that was 10 percent over the year before. And the year before that was 60 percent over the year before. So we kept the thing running and I think we are headed in the right direction.”
– Parsons’ #1 tip on managing in times of rapid change: Get rid of the troublemakers. “Get rid of the people who are the disruptors because they’re just not doing their own job, they are keeping other people from doing their job.”
– Managing cost: “We are cranking on cost right now. … here is where guys like Carl don’t get the joke. In a creative enterprise, you can’t treat people like they are just cogs in a machine.”
– Warner Music sale: “I would do it again. Because music is still a troubled business. They don’t know where the growth is going to come from, if the growth is going to come. Or what the alternatives are.”
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