ÜBERCEO

Last week we asked you what you thought makes a CEO an über CEO? Is it attention to details, focus, expertise, or vision? Or is it something else altogether?

NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker has an interesting answer. Hands down, it’s leadership.

What’s more interesting is that he believes that he is the archetype of this executive virtue in spite of the complete breakdown of leadership at NBC that we have all been witnessing in the last two weeks.


To make the long story short, Conan O’Brien is being forced to step down as the host of the “Tonight Show” and Jay Leno is being brought back in from his 10 o’clock spot. All this is happening although NBC made a clear-cut succession agreement with both Leno and O’Brien five years ago.

Zucker, trying to explain just how all this hoopla happened, put his hand in his pocket and pulled out “leadership.” According to him, this entire mess happened because he’s a leader.

In an interview on “Charlie Rose,” PBS’s late-night interview show, he explaind what executive leadership really means. “Leadership is about taking chances and taking risks and also leadership is about acknowledging when they don’t work.”

That’s a great definition, but that does not mean that it applies to Zucker himself. Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker is first to say that it does not. She wrote a scathing critique of Zucker in this week’s issue saying that instead of leadership, “spectacular failure has been the wind beneath [Zucker’s] wings.” Ouch!