Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
March 5, 2009
How to Succeed in Business While Doing Something Else
There are academics who
think they can teach people to be entrepreneurial. The Kauffman
Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., gives away money to encourage
entrepreneurship. If you read the advertisements in the back of The
Economist, you would think that wealth is only a business degree
away. Hundreds of business schools around the world want to set you on
the path to riches.
If you feel the urge to
enroll in a business school, you might first read Call Me Ted,
the autobiography of Ted Turner – a swashbuckler and an unorthodox
entrepreneur. A husband of Jane Fonda, father of five, winner of the
America’s Cup yacht race, Turner is everything you have heard about and
more. The man who comes through in this book, coauthored with Turner
Broadcasting veteran Bill Burke, first published last year, is a force
in nature – a roiling lightning storm of a man with seemingly
inexhaustible energy and never a hint of self-doubt.
What Turner’s memoir
does not do is dish the dirt about his wives or his opponents in Major
League Baseball, who treated him appallingly because of his
crowd-pleasing antics. Although he was very bitter about being frozen
out at Time Warner after he sold his broadcast properties to the
company, Turner barely raises a lip when writing about Jerry Levin, the
man who finally drove Turner to leave the vice chairmanship of the
company and sell his stock. As you read his story, you come to realize
that despite all the larger-than-life aspects of Turner, he is also a
Southern gentleman.
He writes with passion
and real understanding about the sea and his life-threatening
experiences – one when he was an inexperienced captain, and another when
disastrous storms hit the Fastnet race across the Irish Sea. Some 19
sailors on other boats died in that race, and Turner and his
collaborator do a wonderful job of invoking the horror of a killer
storm. Turner is equally good in describing his tacking duels in the
America’s Cup.
Fascinating is Turner’s
confession that he had no interest in news whatsoever when he started
CNN. He was fascinated with satellite technology and had used it
successfully to turn his Atlanta UHF station into a national or
superstation.
It was the second time
Turner had exploited a new technology. The first was in using microwave
line-of-sight technology to spread his Atlanta station into new markets.
But his big hit was
with CNN. And with it, the no-interest-in-news entrepreneur
revolutionized television news for all time.
In his book, Turner
uses an odd but endearing technique: He has some of the players write
their version of events. This means we get some graphic examples of
Turner in action. One player, Sumner Redstone, believes Turner stood on
his desk during a presentation. Another, John Malone, describes Turner
crawling around the floor during a meeting, shouting, “Whose shoes do I
have to kiss?”
No wonder Turner did
not fit in, unless he owned the company. He did not fit in at Brown
University, where he failed to graduate. He did not fit in as the owner
of the Atlanta Braves and constantly faced fines and suspensions for
violating the other owners’ sense of propriety. He did not always fit in
at the New York Yacht Club with the social sailors.
Turner found the time
to race yachts partly because the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, had
suspended him for acting as the Braves’ manager. Of course, Turner
showed up at the America’s Cup victor’s press conference dead drunk and
slid under the table looking for his bottle.
While racing with the
best on Earth, he was also putting together CNN and jumping over hurdles
set up by Federal Communications Commission for the cable operators.
Turner had something of
a start, but it was modest: He inherited an outdoor advertising company
from his father. He was 24 at the time. He went from there to radio, to
television and into history.
This kind of
entrepreneurism cannot be taught. It takes a wild man with a gleam in
his eye, and a preparedness to bet the company over and over.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This
is Column # LK086.
Request permission to publish here. |