There has been much controversy hounding Jeff Zucker’s management of NBC. Zucker rose from the ranks so to speak—from producer to chief entertainment programmer to network president in a span of about 10 years. A phenomenal rise, observers would say.
Zucker first got noticed when as a producer, he recast, remade, and revived Today. Yet after that phenomenal rise, he doesn’t have a successful show that he can boast of. Zucker took reins just as Friends and Frasier went off the air, leaving the network’s primetime empty. Since then it has been one TV show going down the ratings game after another.
Some quarters however said that Zucker cannot be entirely blamed for it. For two decades, NBC had its season of champions and the best shows on TV from Cheers and The Cosby Show through Seinfeld and ER and Frasier and Friends and The West Wing. In a way, that sort of gave way to complacency and Zucker could very well be the product of that and also over confidence.
However, since the network is 80% owned by General Electric (GE), somehow the question on quality strategy can’t be avoided. In fact, according to Jack Welch himself…
the second of the five stages GE inevitably goes through in response to a crisis is “containment,” which means you “try to make the problem disappear by giving it to someone else to solve.”
Can’t GE’s Six Sigma culture turn around the situation?
An article on New York Metro has this to say about it.
GE’s cultish management philosophy—the so-called Six Sigma system—seems ill-suited to advertising-supported television. Six Sigma is all about reducing defective products to the absolute minimum. Great! But for TV shows, even defining “defects per million opportunities” (the Six Sigma term of art) is an absurd exercise. Moreover, Six Sigma defects are defined by one’s dissatisfied customers, but NBC and all advertising-supported media have two very different sets of customers, the advertisers and the audience. Digital recorders like TiVo, by empowering viewers to ditch the advertisers, make that contradiction all the more acute. And in a fractured culture of niches, the big old-fashioned broadcast networks, whose business models require huge audiences, find it harder than ever to define a single set of viewer-customers: I think NBC’s My Name Is Earl may be the funniest new network sitcom in a decade, but plenty of people will consider it coarse, ugly, unkind—defective.
Yet, in a May 2nd press release, officials of NBC Universal Cable named Michael Schreiber director of new media and Schreiber is a certified GE Six Sigma Black Belt.
Well, you can never tell. Six Sigma might just be NBC’s answer as it was for GE.
