This post was originally published on this site
It’s a funny thing about turnarounds. After one year on the job, the press seems shocked that Chris Licht has not returned CNN to its long-ago dominance. Never mind the fact it took Jeff Zucker nine years of hard work to transform CNN from a respected news organization into a shadow of MSNBC.
Having studied turnarounds for most of my career, I can say with some certainty that failure is usually the result of giving up too early. A great plan and successful execution are never enough. Fortitude is also essential.
Turnarounds are needed because a media organization suffered mismanagement for a very long time, opening the door to competitor success. When that happens, viewers often take it personally, sort of like a divorce, and no longer see the product as relevant to their lives. In this, CNN is a textbook case.
The original idea for CNN was a 24-hour news service whose star was the news. That was the CNN that gained viewer loyalty. When Fox News decided to target viewers to the right, followed by MSNBC’s decision to go left, the obvious move for CNN would have been to play the trust card, but instead, leadership panicked. That can’t all be blamed on Zucker. He was merely the last to take CNN down a dead-end path.
The result was a CNN that lost trust and credibility. That left viewers with few reasons to watch other than perhaps