Should you fire your CEO? (Or yourself?)

If you're a CEO and know your senior team isn't up to the challenge, you must fire them for the good of your organization. As that CEO, you should quit if you're unwilling to do the uncomfortable work of stretching (or firing some longtime colleagues) for the good of your organization. If you’re a board chair and doubt your CEO is up to the task, you must fire them for the good of the organization.”

Tom Davidson, the Bellisario Professor of the Practice in Media Entrepreneurship at Penn State University

If you need any more convincing about the rapid decline in traditional linear broadcasting, look at our colleagues in commercial media.

They aren’t just leaning hard into digital, on-demand endpoints like streaming and podcasting — they’re literally getting rid of legacy ventures; frantically trying to convince Wall Street that they’re just as cool as those digital kids; or in one case, throwing their hands in the air and symbolically yelling, "I QUIT!."

Taken together, these (and more) add up to a cold reality that traditional broadcasting is a dead end with both audiences and financial backers. The only hope of survival is radical digital transformation.

Meanwhile, too many public media outlets’ strategies boil down to “We’re going to rebuild our ratings and lean into on-air pledge.”

So it’s time for every public media board, executive team and CEO to ask a hard question: Do we have the right leadership and skills to lead a radical digital transformation?

If not, it’s time to fix that — even if it means firing people.

As noted last month, traditional tune-in will not magically return. Every shred of evidence from the past decade shows an irreversible flight to on-demand platforms.

Our commercial brethren have adapted — slowly, and sometimes painfully — but Disney (and to a lesser degree Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery) have figured out how to operate in an on-demand, digital, direct-to-consumer environment.

We need to do the same.

That starts with boards, CEOs and executive teams asking themselves critical questions:

Does your strategic plan reflect the shift from tune-in to on-demand? (I could be a bit snarky here and ask, “Does your organization even have a strategic plan? Has it been updated in the last decade? Does the staff know about it so they can make day-to-day decisions accordingly?” — but that’s a rant for another day.)

That shift exposes two nasty realities:

Consumers can find NPR, APM, PBS and APT content anywhere. They don’t need to find it through their local station.

And, even for local content, digital and social channels are hypercompetitive environments with essentially limitless content choices. Any content creator will struggle to gain traction, so we must focus relentlessly on understanding and serving local needs and learning how to market and promote in a different ecosystem.

If your organization’s strategic plan doesn’t reflect these changes, it must be rewritten. And if the senior team (or even the CEO) are unwilling or unable to drive that update, they probably need to go.

Once we reach new digital audiences, do we know what to do with them?

Reaching new audiences is meaningless without an equally sophisticated approach to nurture them through a donor-acquisition funnel. Does your membership department have the savvy and experience to build a donor flow that can’t rely on the guilt-driven psychology of a pledge drive?

Does your leadership team, including the CEO, understand the raw value of each new email address captured? Does your technology stack allow easy integration between your CMS, CRM and ESP? (And do you know what those acronyms stand for?)

This might mean putting your C-suite — even your CEO — on a 90-day crash course to educate them. And if they’re unwilling or unable to learn, they probably need to go.

Does your board understand the seismic changes that have hit media businesses?

Serving on any nonprofit board is a mix of prestige and pressure — and one of the biggest pressures is board members often have no background in the nonprofit’s business sector. That’s often helpful — a well-connected lawyer or financier can bring valuable outside skills and perspectives.

But in moments of crisis, your board should have members with a deep understanding of what's happening in the industry — and loud, confident voices to educate their peers.

Who’s that person on your board?

If you don’t have them, how can you find them — perhaps at a marketing agency that’s seen the impact of shifting audience habits, democratized content creation and the rise of data-driven advertising? Or maybe the local head of a national consultancy who can tap their firm's deep expertise?

If your board’s executive committee doesn’t have those skills, some of them need to go to create room for people who do.         

All this may sound harsh. But these are harsh times.

Some stations have a couple of bad pledge drives (or the loss of CPB funding) until the collapse. Many others are two to five years away from that precipice.

Digital transformations take time — and capital to fund tests and initiatives that will take years to pay off. The system doesn’t have years of handwringing and fretting to save itself.

The time to start is now — yes, even in the face of the enormous distraction over efforts to cut federal funding.

If you're a CEO and know your senior team isn't up to the challenge, you must fire them for the good of your organization.

As that CEO, you should quit if you're unwilling to do the uncomfortable work of stretching (or firing some longtime colleagues) for the good of your organization.

If you’re a board chair and doubt your CEO is up to the task, you must fire them for the good of the organization.

Across the media landscape, leaders are either driving change or quitting.

It’s time for us to do the same.

Tom Davidson is a professor of the practice in media entrepreneurship at the Bellisario School of Communications, Penn State University. He was previously a reporter, general manager and product leader at Tribune, PBS, UNC-TV and Gannett. He can be contacted at tgd@tgdavidson.com.