What seven corporate bosses taught NBC’s Bonnie Hammer about how to navigate change
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Only 60% of women are satisfied with their jobs, AI researcher Fei-Fei Li reportedly founded her own startup, and longtime TV exec Bonnie Hammer knows how to navigate change. Have a terrific Tuesday!
– Ch-ch-changes. In her 40-year career in TV, Bonnie Hammer made it through seven corporate takeovers—and came out on the other side with “a better job each time,” she writes in her new book. Decades as a leader in the tumultuous media business taught Hammer how to navigate change, lessons she shares in 15 Lies Women Are Told at Work…and the Truth We Need to Succeed, out today.
Called the “Queen of cable TV,” Hammer is known for turning the USA and SyFy networks into profit centers behind shows like Suits and Psych and later leading NBC’s cable division to record profits. In her time at these networks, she operated under bosses at Paramount, Time Inc., Viacom, Seagram, GE, and Comcast. Today, she’s vice chair of NBCUniversal.
The key to surviving frequent corporate takeovers was taking a moment to understand the nature of each change, she told me. “What will the tone be? What are the expectations?” Hammer says she asked herself each time. “It’s beyond reading the room—it’s reading the culture.” That requires reading body language, being flexible, and knowing when to compromise.
There will be new rules, and understanding them is critical. “Who has the power? Are they more impressed with ingenuity or the bottom line? Do they love creativity and get content or do they only care about money?”
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
As a manager, the next step is communicating these changes to teams. “You want to put it in a way that doesn’t scare them or threaten them, but helps motivate them to do what their job is and be as creative as they can—but also understand that how they’re going to be judged may be a little different,” she says.
Even so, some change will be difficult. In her book, Hammer writes of a common experience: being passed over for a promotion. In her case, she lost out on a job leading broadcast for NBC in 2007; the role went to “a guy 20 years younger with a quarter of my experience.” She later found out it was because her cable networks were making so much money, the company was scared moving her would risk the cash cow. “Guys just kind of muscle through it,” she says of being passed over. “But women take it very seriously. They personalize it instead of saying, ‘I didn’t get this. What can I get?’ Or ‘What should I do next?’”
The constant through Hammer’s career, and her memoir, is change. Today’s media industry, she says, isn’t more tumultuous than it has been in the past; each change only seems like it’s worse than what’s come before, she says. “How you approach change is what matters,” she says. “Not that there is change.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
– Nine-to-fine. A new Conference Board survey found that 60% of women report being satisfied with their jobs, marking the sixth year in a row that women’s job satisfaction has ranked below men’s. Financial compensation is the largest factor behind the disparity, though some suggest women are also disgruntled about fewer remote work opportunities. Wall Street Journal
– Model behavior. Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford professor known as the “godmother of AI” for her pioneering research, is reportedly building an AI model capable of “advanced reasoning,” according to Reuters. A startup that Li reportedly founded—with backing from Andreessen Horowitz and others—is developing the model. Fortune
– Sales to staffing. Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin told Fortune that she joined the HR software developer after 15 years at Salesforce because she thinks it can “do for the employee what Salesforce did for customers.” Franklin describes Lattice, valued at $3 billion, as a people-managing tool to help companies navigate AI and concerns about “employee disengagement.” Fortune
– Stopping at the source. Alabama is leading U.S. efforts to completely eliminate cervical cancer by increasing vaccination rates against the human papillomavirus, the cause of 90% of cervical cancer cases. The state has the fourth highest rate of cervical cancer in the U.S. Wall Street Journal
– Airwaves go silent. A union of journalists at Rai, a popular public broadcaster in Italy, went on strike on Monday, complaining of editorial interference by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The union opposes Meloni’s claims that the broadcaster is too leftist and the presence of Meloni’s government appointees on its governing board. Financial Times
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Tropicana Brands Group appointed Olu Beck to its board of directors.
ON MY RADAR
Kaitlin Butts is leading a red dirt revolution Rolling Stone
Brittney Griner’s joyful next chapter The Cut
She wrote the first great perimenopause novel New York Times
PARTING WORDS
“I just wanted to make a statement about the fact that we don’t shrivel up and die at 40.”
— Robinne Lee, actress and author of The Idea of You, which is now a movie starring Anne Hathaway
