“Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.”

Pete Townshend wrote this lyric as a cynical rebuke to the flower-power idealism of the 1960s.  For all the rallies, sit-ins, and protest music, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is a savage, blistering reminder to the “hippie” generation that in the end, leadership matters.  If the new boss isn’t any different than the old one, nothing changes.

I’ve thought of this line often watching recent events unfold in big media:  the Charter/Disney dispute, the shopping of ABC and possibly other traditional linear networks, Rupert Murdoch’s retirement, Paramount’s sluggish performance, to name just a few.

Listen to any quarterly update from legacy media CEOs and you’ll hear the myriad of reasons (or less generously, the excuses) for their falling stock prices and anemic performance:  cord cutting, changing viewing habits, rise of streaming, more deep pocketed competitors, a troubled economy.

But they don’t talk about the one reason that supersedes and binds together all the others:  the failure to responsibly plan for a day when they are no longer CEO.  Worse, the boards of these companies that are supposed to hold their CEOs accountable for succession planning let them get away with it.   

When things are going well it’s easy to put aside succession planning.  Most CEOs don’t like to think about their own obsolescence, especially when they’re riding high.  And the leaders of today’s traditional media companies have enjoyed careers filled with stunning successes.  Rupert Murdoch built Fox and News Corp from a single newspaper in Australia.  Bob Iger’s accomplishments as CEO are too numerous to mention.  When a presumed giant walks the halls of power, who wants to think about a day when he or she is not there?

Yet the consequences of this failure of foresight are now readily apparent.  At the very same time legacy media was experiencing so much success, the storm clouds which now darken its present and future loomed over the horizon – for years.  None of the systemic challenges confronting these CEOs came out of nowhere.  They have been talked about for a decade, if not longer.  Yet legacy media boards don’t hold their CEOs accountable for failing to adequately prepare. By ignoring succession planning they signaled to consumers, investors and employees that the future of the company was up to one person.

Succession planning represents a company’s ultimate commitment to its future success.  It’s a statement from corporate leadership that they understand that we won’t allow those at the pinnacle of power today to sacrifice the future of the company to serve their own aims. 

Let’s make this real.  Imagine a scenario where legacy media boards worked with their CEOs a decade ago to put in place concrete succession plans, rather than allowing them to decide unilaterally what’s best.   Looking through this alternate lens of history presents some interesting questions.

Would another CEO have waited as long to sell ABC and ESPN? 

Would Paramount be better off if different leadership decided not to reunify CBS and Viacom? 

Would Fox’s future be clearer, and its recent past less sullied by scandal?

In such a world where new bosses might have answered these questions differently than the old ones, billions in shareholder losses could have been avoided, countless jobs could have been saved and better outcomes created for consumers.

There’s another sad irony to the succession question.  Traditional media have eliminated thousands of jobs in the past year.  Many of the people impacted were older employees.  Older employees cost more and often get a bum rap for being trapped in “legacy mindsets” that are antithetical to changing cultures.

Boards fully endorsed these staff reductions, often accompanied by somber statements about the painful choices CEOs must confront, as examples of responsible, disciplined management.  Yet these same boards never applied that line of reasoning to their CEOs.

To be clear, I’ve written many times against ageism in the workplace.  Employees in their 50s and 60s still have much to offer.  It is the height of hypocrisy for boards to allow CEOs to execute layoffs that largely target older employees yet willfully overlook the failure of these same men (and they are notably almost all men) in their 70s, or older.

It would be nice if CEOs embraced succession planning, but human nature being what it is we should not be surprised that they often hang around longer than they should.  It’s hard to walk away from all the accouterments of power that come with being a big time CEO.  If I’m being honest, I probably would hang onto the job as long as I could.

But that’s the point.  Succession planning at publicly traded companies shouldn’t come down to the prerogatives of one person, no matter their track record.  And if special classes of stock allow family owners to avoid succession planning, we ought to look at regulatory changes that give all shareholders an equal voice in corporate leadership.

To paraphrase Townshend, we should know by now that finding the new boss is too important to be left to the old boss.  Until we demand more from the boards of legacy media companies, we will continue to get fooled again and again.