As the entire universe apparently now knows, NBC bungled it big time when it came to letting Jay Leno retire and hand the reins of The Tonight Show over to Conan O’Brien. In addition to the obvious lessons we can learn from this disaster, such as “Jay Leno sucks” and “Conan O’Brien is hilarious,” FedLine (aka the Federal Times’ blog) points out some management lessons that we can learn from the mishandling of the whole situation. Let’s hope some TV executives take these tips to heart.
Lesson #1: Career progression is crucial to retaining top talent.
In other words, if your most talented people know they’ll be stuck in their jobs a long time because there’s nowhere for them to go internally, they will leave. And it will be your fault for not providing enough incentives.
Lesson #3: If you’re going to fire someone, just do it already.
One of the most embarrassing parts of the whole late night fiasco was the way that it was handled so publicly and that it took seemingly forever to resolve. That worked out nicely for Conan’s audience, who got to enjoy weeks’ worth of him taking potshots at NBC and putting together hilarious skits about wasting the network’s money, but it only protracted the whole situation. Good for viewers, not so good for NBC.
And while we’re on the subject of the lovely Mr. O’Brien, let’s all take his incredibly classy goodbye speech advice to heart:
As any regular STA reader knows, I’m a big Conan O’Brien fan. Even though I wish he would still go back and write episodes for “The Simpsons,” I’ve been totally grossed out by the way Jay Leno and NBC have treated Conan during his stint on “The Tonight Show.” One of the upsides of the whole late night war, though, is all the awesome television coming out of it. Conan has not pulled any punches, making fun of NBC and Leno as much as he can before leaving the network. This clip, though, was one of the best yet: a crossover with fellow NBC star Jack McBrayer in character as 30 Rock’s Kenneth the Page. And what was Kenneth doing at the Tonight Show? Giving a studio tour, of course.
Conan O’Brien was interviewed on his very own episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio, even though he isn’t an actor. One thing I really liked was that he talked about some non-showbiz stuff that he did, including a brief stint as a Capitol Hill intern. Conan worked for a short time as an intern to his district’s congressional representative, but his main memory of the experience was “making lots of copies.” He also cops to having had a bit of an entitlement problem, admitting he didn’t want to work his way up through the ranks but rather skip straight to the top. Oh, Conan, you adorable former “Simpsons”-episode writer, you. Why people preferred watching Jay Leno to this man is an absolute mystery to me.
Remember when Conan hired a zombie to be his personal assistant on The Tonight Show? Well, he’s keeping the bit going – and mocking Twilight in the process, which is always fun. Enter the brooding vampire, the hot werewolf, and … the sexy mummy?
John Krasinski is best known for playing the Jim on The Office, but it turns out he has a pretty impressive resume. In addition to majoring in playwriting at Brown University, he studied acting at various places including The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and The Actor’s Center in New York City. Not only does the guy have technique, he also put in time doing less-than-glamorous work before finding TV stardom. He spent some time working as a script intern on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
Not only is this guy yummy, he is willing to work hard. If I wasn’t already planning to go check out his bearded hipster hotness in the movie Away We Go, learning this information would have totally pushed me over the edge.
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