| Quitting a Non-Job |
3 February 2003
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Ted Turner Wisely Leaves AOL Time Warner
Ted Turner, founder of CNN and the man who made the Altanta Braves a team to watch, has decided to quit as Vice-Chairman of AOL Time Warner. Congratulations are in order. Mr. Turner has come to his senses and seen that the non-job of Vice-Chairman was created solely to give him a place at a table that shouldn't have been built.
The merger of AOL, Time and Warner Brothers was supposed to give shareholders immense profits as the synergies to be realized kicked in. Instead, the company has just posted the largest quarterly loss in US corporate history at $99 billion. Mr. Turner himself is out millions of paper profits.
Of course, financially, he hasn't a care in the world. He'll always have enough to buy groceries and keep the heat on. But the position in which he found himself was not about money, it was about vision and control. As Vice-Chairman, he had no ability to make things happen, which is what always made the Mouth of the South so successful.
The man who set up the Goodwill Games to short circuit the US-Soviet Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984, who made WTBS-Atlanta a local channel for millions of cable subscribers, who won the America's Cup, must have loved getting buy-in, dimensioning problems, and the rest of the business management rubbish with which he never had to contend when he ran his own show.
He says he wants to spend more time on his (many and genuine) philanthropic endeavors. May luck and success follow him, but as a lone wolf, not a committeeman. For him, that would be happiness in itself.