Comcast's Burke: Disney bid isn't personal
By Don Steinberg
Inquirer Staff Writer
Steve Burke, president of Comcast Corp.'s cable division, isn't surprised - or even too annoyed - by all the attention he's been getting since the company launched its bid to acquire the Walt Disney Co.
It's the nature of some of the attention that bemuses him.
Burke joined Comcast in 1998 after 12 years at Disney. He left, in part, because his blazing career path hit a wall at the upper echelon occupied by Michael D. Eisner, Disney's imperious chief executive, according to some observers.
Now, if the Comcast bid succeeds, Burke is the likely man to take control of Disney's operations, in a triumphant return. How Hollywood!
But get real, Burke says. You don't base a $60 billion takeover bid on a revenge fantasy.
"What has bemused me most is the assumption that it's a personal quest," said Burke, "the idea that I leave Disney five and a half years ago, come to Philadelphia, and then can't wait to go back and 'fix' it..."
If anything, Burke came to Philadelphia with his wife, Gretchen, and five school-age children to settle, to escape the intensity of his previous assignments in New York, Los Angeles and Paris.
Here, Comcast chief executive officer Brian Roberts and Burke "have been able to avoid a lot of media attention, and we like that," Burke said. "We love the business, but we'd just as soon drive our kids to school and have a good life.
"We'll have had five great years of success here if we do nothing" about Disney, Burke said last week. "And there's a side of me that says that would be more enjoyable, from a purely personal point of view, than putting together Comcast and Disney. The reason I'm supportive of putting together Comcast and Disney is a matter of industrial economics."
Ah, yes, the romance of industrial economics. Burke is so good at that stuff that it's been impossible for him to lie low for long.
Like Roberts, Burke, 45, comes from a media-business family. His brother Bill runs the Weather Channel. Their father, Daniel Burke, was a beloved chief executive officer at Capital Cities/ABC, retiring around the time it was bought by Disney.
Over the years, Burke has repeatedly aced new assignments, from his first job after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1982 - conjuring up new uses for Grape Nuts cereal ("We had a hundred ideas, like putting Grape Nuts under your tires to gain traction on ice") - to his work at Disney, to his latest gig boosting profits more quickly than anyone expected for the cable systems that Comcast acquired from AT&T Corp. in 2002.
"I've watched him four times in 15 years throwing himself into businesses that were new to him, and every time just rising to the top," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, who quit Disney a decade ago to form the DreamWorks entertainment studio with Stephen Spielberg and David Geffen. "When we started DreamWorks, there was no one I tried harder to recruit than Steve."
Still, could Burke fix Disney - whose properties include the legendary movie studio and theme parks, ABC television, and cable channels such as ESPN?
Could he fill the shoes of Eisner, who, despite a run of bad years before 2003, has crafted American popular culture for three decades? Eisner delivered ABC-TV shows such as Happy Days and the mini-series Roots; Disney movies including The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid, and Paramount classics such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Grease, and Saturday Night Fever.
Burke has spent the last 15 months boosting the ARPU (average revenue per unit) in the AT&T cable systems.
"People say 'Are you and Brian Roberts qualified to make creative decisions?' And my answer is 'no.' We're not going to go in and decide who to cast in a movie or how to draw an animated character. But we are good at finding talented people and creating an environment where they succeed. That's how you get big."
Burke is lauded for just those kinds of things that critics have said Eisner lacks: finding good people, winding them up, pointing them in the right direction, and letting them go.
Burke joined Disney in 1986 and was an instant whiz kid, charged with inventing new businesses for the company to enter. He launched the Disney's retail stores.
Then Eisner sent Burke to Paris to rescue Euro Disney, whose opening had been a disaster. The French hated everything it stood for; President Francois Mitterand denounced it.
At 34, Burke had never run a theme park or a hotel. He hired a tutor to come in every morning before work to teach him French. While Euro Disney lost half a billion dollars, "we restructured the loans, we had to lay off thousands of people, we changed all the marketing," he said. Eisner persuaded former President George Bush to smooth things over with Mitterand. (Burke recently was named among the top fund-raisers of George W. Bush.)
By the time Burke left Paris, the renamed Paris Disneyland was making money.
When Disney acquired ABC in 1996, Burke was the first Disney employee sent in to make the integration work - a job he will need to repeat if Comcast's bid succeeds. He became president of ABC Broadcasting, in charge of its TV and radio stations. Some considered him an heir to Eisner, but others saw him experiencing the same frustration that led many other Disney executives to defect.
"The fact of the matter is that every decision is made by Michael Eisner and [Disney president] Bob Iger," said someone who worked with Burke at Disney and asked not to be named. "The creative process is basically stifled there... . That's precisely what drove both of us from Disney."
Burke won't talk about that, but he said, "I can still remember, when I left Disney, a lot of people were saying, 'What are you doing? You're president of ABC Broadcasting, you're moving from New York to Philadelphia, working for a cable company with four million subscribers, for a guy who's your age and you're never going to be CEO? What's wrong with you?' "
At Comcast, it's been so far, so good for Burke. The company now has more than 21 million subscribers and is the largest conveyor of TV programming to America.
Though some question his Hollywood chops - and some, including analysts such as William Drewry of Credit Suisse First Boston, have been saying for months that Eisner is rescuing Disney quite well all by himself - others think Burke could cure what ails Disney. Former Disney board members Roy E. Disney and Stanley Gold, who have been lobbying for Eisner's ouster, have praised Burke, even though they oppose Comcast's bid.
Burke's stated plan for making a Comcast-Disney mix work is, so far, more about management than about finding the next blockbuster. As with the AT&T integration, most of the fixes he discusses involve his strengths: people, operations, technology.
To revive Disney's animation, he'd try to repair Disney's torn relationship with Pixar Animation Studios, and likely court others as well. He'd also seek operational improvements relying on a paradoxical mix of cost-cutting and boosting employee morale.
"For a variety of reasons, the Walt Disney Co. is not performing as well as it did five years ago. We think that some of that could be addressed by creating a different culture," Burke said.
And he also sees a holy grail in combining video from Disney movies, ESPN sports, and ABC-TV with Comcast's technologies, creating new ways to view the content that could make cable, as prices continue to rise, continue to seem like a good deal versus its only real rival, satellite TV.
Was the idea of going back to buy Disney ever discussed when Roberts was lured to Philadelphia in 1998? Get real, Burke insists again: "It would have been unthinkable."
Now it isn't. And despite Comcast's failure to concede that there's a Hollywood storyline in all this, there's a new item in the lobby outside the offices of Comcast's executives, hinting that they might be more starstruck than they admit. It's a golden Oscar statuette, on loan from Turner Broadcasting, given in 1930 for sound production.
If you're looking for a Hollywood ending, you have to start somewhere.
By Don Steinberg
Inquirer Staff Writer
Steve Burke, president of Comcast Corp.'s cable division, isn't surprised - or even too annoyed - by all the attention he's been getting since the company launched its bid to acquire the Walt Disney Co.
It's the nature of some of the attention that bemuses him.
Burke joined Comcast in 1998 after 12 years at Disney. He left, in part, because his blazing career path hit a wall at the upper echelon occupied by Michael D. Eisner, Disney's imperious chief executive, according to some observers.
Now, if the Comcast bid succeeds, Burke is the likely man to take control of Disney's operations, in a triumphant return. How Hollywood!
But get real, Burke says. You don't base a $60 billion takeover bid on a revenge fantasy.
"What has bemused me most is the assumption that it's a personal quest," said Burke, "the idea that I leave Disney five and a half years ago, come to Philadelphia, and then can't wait to go back and 'fix' it..."
If anything, Burke came to Philadelphia with his wife, Gretchen, and five school-age children to settle, to escape the intensity of his previous assignments in New York, Los Angeles and Paris.
Here, Comcast chief executive officer Brian Roberts and Burke "have been able to avoid a lot of media attention, and we like that," Burke said. "We love the business, but we'd just as soon drive our kids to school and have a good life.
"We'll have had five great years of success here if we do nothing" about Disney, Burke said last week. "And there's a side of me that says that would be more enjoyable, from a purely personal point of view, than putting together Comcast and Disney. The reason I'm supportive of putting together Comcast and Disney is a matter of industrial economics."
Ah, yes, the romance of industrial economics. Burke is so good at that stuff that it's been impossible for him to lie low for long.
Like Roberts, Burke, 45, comes from a media-business family. His brother Bill runs the Weather Channel. Their father, Daniel Burke, was a beloved chief executive officer at Capital Cities/ABC, retiring around the time it was bought by Disney.
Over the years, Burke has repeatedly aced new assignments, from his first job after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1982 - conjuring up new uses for Grape Nuts cereal ("We had a hundred ideas, like putting Grape Nuts under your tires to gain traction on ice") - to his work at Disney, to his latest gig boosting profits more quickly than anyone expected for the cable systems that Comcast acquired from AT&T Corp. in 2002.
"I've watched him four times in 15 years throwing himself into businesses that were new to him, and every time just rising to the top," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, who quit Disney a decade ago to form the DreamWorks entertainment studio with Stephen Spielberg and David Geffen. "When we started DreamWorks, there was no one I tried harder to recruit than Steve."
Still, could Burke fix Disney - whose properties include the legendary movie studio and theme parks, ABC television, and cable channels such as ESPN?
Could he fill the shoes of Eisner, who, despite a run of bad years before 2003, has crafted American popular culture for three decades? Eisner delivered ABC-TV shows such as Happy Days and the mini-series Roots; Disney movies including The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid, and Paramount classics such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Grease, and Saturday Night Fever.
Burke has spent the last 15 months boosting the ARPU (average revenue per unit) in the AT&T cable systems.
"People say 'Are you and Brian Roberts qualified to make creative decisions?' And my answer is 'no.' We're not going to go in and decide who to cast in a movie or how to draw an animated character. But we are good at finding talented people and creating an environment where they succeed. That's how you get big."
Burke is lauded for just those kinds of things that critics have said Eisner lacks: finding good people, winding them up, pointing them in the right direction, and letting them go.
Burke joined Disney in 1986 and was an instant whiz kid, charged with inventing new businesses for the company to enter. He launched the Disney's retail stores.
Then Eisner sent Burke to Paris to rescue Euro Disney, whose opening had been a disaster. The French hated everything it stood for; President Francois Mitterand denounced it.
At 34, Burke had never run a theme park or a hotel. He hired a tutor to come in every morning before work to teach him French. While Euro Disney lost half a billion dollars, "we restructured the loans, we had to lay off thousands of people, we changed all the marketing," he said. Eisner persuaded former President George Bush to smooth things over with Mitterand. (Burke recently was named among the top fund-raisers of George W. Bush.)
By the time Burke left Paris, the renamed Paris Disneyland was making money.
When Disney acquired ABC in 1996, Burke was the first Disney employee sent in to make the integration work - a job he will need to repeat if Comcast's bid succeeds. He became president of ABC Broadcasting, in charge of its TV and radio stations. Some considered him an heir to Eisner, but others saw him experiencing the same frustration that led many other Disney executives to defect.
"The fact of the matter is that every decision is made by Michael Eisner and [Disney president] Bob Iger," said someone who worked with Burke at Disney and asked not to be named. "The creative process is basically stifled there... . That's precisely what drove both of us from Disney."
Burke won't talk about that, but he said, "I can still remember, when I left Disney, a lot of people were saying, 'What are you doing? You're president of ABC Broadcasting, you're moving from New York to Philadelphia, working for a cable company with four million subscribers, for a guy who's your age and you're never going to be CEO? What's wrong with you?' "
At Comcast, it's been so far, so good for Burke. The company now has more than 21 million subscribers and is the largest conveyor of TV programming to America.
Though some question his Hollywood chops - and some, including analysts such as William Drewry of Credit Suisse First Boston, have been saying for months that Eisner is rescuing Disney quite well all by himself - others think Burke could cure what ails Disney. Former Disney board members Roy E. Disney and Stanley Gold, who have been lobbying for Eisner's ouster, have praised Burke, even though they oppose Comcast's bid.
Burke's stated plan for making a Comcast-Disney mix work is, so far, more about management than about finding the next blockbuster. As with the AT&T integration, most of the fixes he discusses involve his strengths: people, operations, technology.
To revive Disney's animation, he'd try to repair Disney's torn relationship with Pixar Animation Studios, and likely court others as well. He'd also seek operational improvements relying on a paradoxical mix of cost-cutting and boosting employee morale.
"For a variety of reasons, the Walt Disney Co. is not performing as well as it did five years ago. We think that some of that could be addressed by creating a different culture," Burke said.
And he also sees a holy grail in combining video from Disney movies, ESPN sports, and ABC-TV with Comcast's technologies, creating new ways to view the content that could make cable, as prices continue to rise, continue to seem like a good deal versus its only real rival, satellite TV.
Was the idea of going back to buy Disney ever discussed when Roberts was lured to Philadelphia in 1998? Get real, Burke insists again: "It would have been unthinkable."
Now it isn't. And despite Comcast's failure to concede that there's a Hollywood storyline in all this, there's a new item in the lobby outside the offices of Comcast's executives, hinting that they might be more starstruck than they admit. It's a golden Oscar statuette, on loan from Turner Broadcasting, given in 1930 for sound production.
If you're looking for a Hollywood ending, you have to start somewhere.
