Tag archive: conan-o%e2%80%99brien
Conan, Heckling and Negotiation
Watching and listening to Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno square-off against NBC and each other was getting really ugly. The situation, which NBC admittedly mishandled, was pretty bad. Everyone was losing something—NBC was losing money, Jay Leno was losing his prime-time show and Conan was losing the Tonight Show. In the midst of all the talk was a business negotiation between NBC and Conan O’Brien.
In the end, Conan has agreed to walk away from the Tonight Show. Read more about the settlement.
The question is: Was Conan a heckler and did it help or hurt him?
In a negotiation, the heckler is the person who exploits weaknesses and generally, does not treat people courteously. Heckling can be verbal, physical and psychological. Verbal heckling includes kidding and nonsense talk. Physical heckling may include uncomfortable seating arrangements. Psychological heckling may include questioning someone’s intelligence, deliberately ignoring people, or even subtle threats.
Unfortunately, heckling can work in the short run because it shakes people up. A heckler’s goal is to reduce the ability of the other party to deal with the negotiation at hand. People may resort to heckling as a last ditch effort to shift the power in a negotiation.
We don’t know how the internal business negotiations were handled between Conan and NBC. However, we did witness lots of public sparring and put-downs. (Read this New York Times article about the decrease in civility) It may be safe to assume that Conan did engage in some heckling with NBC, and that in the end, he got what he wanted.
Heckling may have helped Conan in his negotiation with NBC, but it may have hurt him in the public’s eyes. We will have to wait and see where and when he reappears.
Have you ever dealt with a heckler? Have you heckled in a negotiation?
Read more »
Re-Negotiating A Broken Contract
What happens when you try to re-negotiate on a broken contract?
In case you haven’t been watching television in the last couple of days, NBC is quitting its failed experiment of airing The Jay Leno Show at 10:00 p.m. and wants to push it back to start at 11:35 p.m., after the news.
The problem starts with the Tonight Show and Conan O’Brien. Conan took over the Tonight Show when Jay Leno left for the earlier time slot. Conan had been promised the slot when he started with NBC several years earlier. Now, NBC, in spite of having a contract with Conan, wants to push The Tonight Show to a later start, at 12:05 p.m. Conan is refusing, as this statement revels: (http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/conan-obrien-says-he-wont-do-tonight-show-following-leno) because he feels it would destroy the show.
NBC is a difficult situation because it has to re-negotiate with two stars (Jay and Conan) and two contracts. Both contracts stand to be changed or even broken by time slot changes.
There are many lessons to be learned, perhaps chief among them, as columnist Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post points out, is that you should not resolve internal conflicts with costly, untested solutions. He writes:
“For NBC, the decision to move Leno to an earlier time slot had nothing to do with the desires of TV viewers. Rather, it seemed like a clever solution to the problem of having promised the "Tonight Show" to O'Brien five years earlier in an effort to prevent him from jumping to a rival network. It's a common mistake in business -- letting key decisions be driven not by market demand but by the need to resolve internal conflicts. As NBC discovered, it rarely works out for the best.”
Read the whole article here: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/12/AR2010011203671.html) which gives an excellent overview about what happened at NBC.
For business negotiations, the question is can you re-negotiate a broken contract? Can you reach an agreement when there are broken promises and hard feelings on the table? The NBC drama is unfolding and we will soon see how NBC executives end up resolving this acrimonious dispute.
What do you think will happen at NBC?
Read more »