Opinion: New ESPN Book Reveals Level 5 Leadership

From Charles Warner, The Media Curmudgeon

Last week a new oral history titled Those Guys Have All the Fun: The Inside World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales hit book stores and Kindles to well-deserved favorable reviews.

The reviews I read concentrated on sexual harassment capers, narcissistic personalities such as the ultimate bad boy Keith Olbermann and bumptious Chris Berman, and boozy parties and escapades – in other words, all the fun stuff that will appeal to sports fans and ESPN addicts (of which I am one).

Woven artfully into the warp and woof of sexual harassment, self-absorbed personalities, and protean drinking is a business story about a startup with little chance of success that was rescued by Getty Oil and some brilliant, hard-nosed executives such as Bill Grimes, Roger Werner, and Steve Boornstein. These visionaries had to cope with often clueless, penny pinching, visionless, egomaniacal old-style media executives, epitomized by narcissist-in-chief Michael Eisner when he was head of Disney, 80 percent owner of ESPN.

The old-style media executives Grimes, Werner, and Boornstein had to report to were domineering, Type-A credit hogs such as Stuart Evy, Herb Granath, and Michael Eisner – prototypes for a current crop of Type-A, greedy media moguls such as Barry Diller, Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, Les Moonves, and Mel Karmizan (the short list). The media for these moguls is a bong for personal enrichment – it’s all about them getting rich.

But in Those Guys Have All the Fun, a new type of media executive emerges, what Jim Collins, the author of the best-selling management book of all time, Good to Great, would refer to as Level 5 leaders.

Level 5 leaders typically are insiders who come up through the ranks of the company, have a compelling modesty, give credit to others, and are superb listeners. Collins writes that Level 5 leaders build “enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will,” and that they “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed they are incredibly ambitious — but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.”

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