I had a front row seat to some of these shenanigans when I worked adjacent to some people directly involved in the Warner Media spinoff from AT&T. The level of executive incompetence would astound you. Even if you have worked for other big corps and think you’ve seen it all… this whole divestiture was an absolute clown show compared to what you usually see coming out of the C-Suite. And AT&T ate billions and billions in debt for this. lol
I already can imagine the number of meetings had over weeks and months agonizing every name change and referencing focus groups etc with a bunch of people talking about numbers etc, gross.
There were plenty on both sides in that circus. I would say most of the blame is with AT&T though. When they bought Warner Media they replaced media execs with telco execs that knew jack shit about running a media business, and those execs ignored everyone telling them the right way to do things. Once you know about that, everything else makes a lot of sense.
I can believe that. I used to work in broadcast TV operations/engineering and remember a boss at the time lamenting about how the FCC board was composed entirely of telco people, so it was no surprise that they were taking all our spectrum and giving it to the telcos. I can only imagine if you put them directly in charge of the media company.
I had a front row seat to some of these shenanigans when I worked adjacent to some people directly involved in the Warner Media spinoff from AT&T. The level of executive incompetence would astound you. Even if you have worked for other big corps and think you’ve seen it all… this whole divestiture was an absolute clown show compared to what you usually see coming out of the C-Suite. And AT&T ate billions and billions in debt for this. lol
I already can imagine the number of meetings had over weeks and months agonizing every name change and referencing focus groups etc with a bunch of people talking about numbers etc, gross.
Were the clowns mostly AT&T or Warner? Or pretty even between both?
There were plenty on both sides in that circus. I would say most of the blame is with AT&T though. When they bought Warner Media they replaced media execs with telco execs that knew jack shit about running a media business, and those execs ignored everyone telling them the right way to do things. Once you know about that, everything else makes a lot of sense.
I can believe that. I used to work in broadcast TV operations/engineering and remember a boss at the time lamenting about how the FCC board was composed entirely of telco people, so it was no surprise that they were taking all our spectrum and giving it to the telcos. I can only imagine if you put them directly in charge of the media company.