David Carr, one of a platoon of media writers at the New York Times, today brings us an enlightening profile of media titan Dick Parsons, the head of Time Warner.
Parsons, Carr reminds us, is everything most media tycoons are not: deceptively easy-going, soft-spoken, understated — and black.
He notes that, just as Parsons got little of the blame when his predecessors nearly sank the company with the ill-considered and ill-fated merger with AOL, he is getting little of the credit for straightening out the mess that he inherited after Bob Pittman, Steve Case and Gerald Levin (in that order) self-destructed — leaving Parsons the last man standing amid the smoking debris of the executive suite.
In fact, Carr notes, Parsons has engineered a stunning turnaround: Time Warner’s profits were up 25 percent in the first quarter; billions of dollars of debt have been retired by selling off some assets, most notably Warner Music; and, with the company’s pending purchase of the cable assets of Adelphia Communications, “the company’s journey from basket case to going concern is complete.”
Well, maybe. Carr also notes that because Wall Street “couldn’t care less” about Parson’s accomplishments, the company’s stock remains depressed — so much so that Google, which has a mere $3.2 billion in sales, is valued at $78.5 billion by Wall Street, several hundred million bucks more than Time Warner, which has $42 billion in sales.
“Expectations were low when Mr. Parsons was handed the flaming baton in 2002,” Carr writes, “in part because, as a black man, he had been viewed as [little more than] a hood ornament of executive diversity.” He suggests that the very traits that have enabled Parsons to repair a train wreck that few wanted to touch — “a lack of ego, an allergy to hype and a refusal to pander” — are qualities that don’t play well on a Wall Street that is more entranced by who’s the flashiest, who’s the loudest and who’s the new new thing.
Circling back to race, Carr notes that:
While there is a conceit that talented black executives have a leg up because of scarcity, it is axiomatic among the people who actually live the life that they have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Mr. Parsons has spent his career being underestimated, and while he does not dwell on his race, it is never far from his mind. When we talked a year ago after a meeting with employees out on the lot of Warner Brothers in Los Angeles, I mentioned that his race seemed less important in [news] coverage as time passed.
“Less important to whom?” he asked, holding my gaze.
Carr makes it clear that, despite the bland, affable exterior, Parsons “likes to win,” and his placid demeanor “masks a conviction that the market is dead wrong: about the entertainment business, about his company, about him. But, then, he is used to that.”
This isn’t just first-rate and counterintuitive reporting that goes one long step past conventional wisdom; it’s also first-rate writing, bringing alive both the man and the businessman behind one of the biggest corporate rehabilitations in recent years.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.