Open Exchange: Beyond the Boardroom with Jonathan Tisch

New York, NY
Season 2, Episode 9

GUEST: Susan Lyne, President and CEO, Omnimedia
OPEN EXCHANGE HOST: Jonathan Tisch

JONATHAN TISCH: Susan, we're here in Chelsea, this area of town is booming, you guys are a big part of the expansion down here, but for you it started in Boston, you are the eldest of five, was your household a vision of domestic bliss when you grew up?

SUSAN LYNE: It really was, you know, I grew up with four brothers and sisters, all of us born with a five year span.

TISCH: That's quick.

LYNE: It was very fast, and we lived in a big house on Chestnut Hill that had enough bedrooms that you could escape, but it was a big, extended Irish-Catholic family, and lots of Sunday dinners and lots of gatherings.

TISCH: Was your mother, and maybe with your fathers help, at doing the homemaker thing?

LYNE: My mother never loved the homemaker thing, I mean she had a spotless house, she was a great entertainer, but she hated to cook, she hated the kitchen, she would've been a great executive if she had been born a generation later, she was a terrific organizer, but she grew up during a time when what was expected was that she'd get married, she'd have children, she'd give great dinner parties, she was a lifetime volunteer, and I think that she lived out her dreams through her daughters.

TISCH: Your father was one who encouraged you to learn more about the world and explore, was it at that moment you decided to go out west and see what the rest of the country held for you?

LYNE: Absolutely, my father, I think partly because he had four daughters as well as a son, even though he was a conservative Republican and he was an early womens libber, in the sense that he wanted everything for his daughters to be possible. And when I decided that I really wanted to leave school for a period of time my mother was appalled, I said I wanted to drive across country with four friends, and my father got out maps and he was excited for me, the idea of being able to explore the country, really see it up close, he felt would be an extraordinary experience.

TISCH: From what I've read you were a Sixties Berkeley radical.

LYNE: Oh yes I was (laughs), I was.

TISCH: Who then went to work for Jane Fonda, so that was juxtaposed to having grown up in Chestnut Hill.

LYNE: No, absolutely, it was look, I came of age during a very particular time, and I'd gone down to Washington to school initially, and there was an enormous amount of turmoil because of the Vietnam War, and I was caught up in it, I was caught up in the idea that we could change the world. And I was caught up in the idea that young people had a right to speak, and it was very heady. So went out to Berkeley, and continuing to be involved in politics was very much a part of my life.

TISCH: And you never quite finished college.

LYNE: No I did not (laughs).

TISCH: You dropped out a handful of times.

LYNE: I did, yes I did (laughs). Ultimately I wanted to work.

TISCH: You have two daughters and two step-daughters.

LYNE: Right.

TISCH: Would you be thrilled if they said Mom, we're not going to make it through college.

LYNE: Whatever my daughters decide to do I will support them, but I think school is enormously important, especially now, you know, it was a different moment then, there were so many opportunities for a young ambitious person, and I think now there's so much competition for jobs, even entry level jobs, that I think it's important. It's also important just to know something extremely well, very deeply, that's what is going to be valuable I think going forward.

TISCH: Tell me what it was like to work with Jane Fonda in those days.

LYNE: She was fabulous, you know, she was-- I actually met her when I was in Berkeley, she came up there to do a film, this was after she had returned from her Barbarella days and she had started a film company and they were doing really interesting work, they made a film called Coming Home that was really the first movie I think to really take on the impact of that Vietnam War on families. A film called China Syndrome that was the first movie to look at nuclear power, and she was the first actress I knew who believed she could actually develop her own material, that she could use films to say something as well as to entertain people. And she was, you know, a whirlwind. So when I got the opportunity, it was actually years later, I went into journalism for a number of years, I was the managing editor at "The Village Voice for four years, and it was at the end of that run that I decided to join Jane, and she had joined forces with a former classmate of mine, and they were making really interesting movies. And so I thought it would be very easy to translate my skills, my journalism skills, my editing skills, to film, and it was one of those moments that was very useful for me going forward, because I think I was over-confident, and there was a lot that I had to learn once I got into that business.

TISCH: And then as you mentioned, you ended up in the film industry, what did you find when you got to Hollywood?

LYNE: You know, I found that the pace of development and the amount of waste really was just not something that worked for my persona, movies take so long to really come to life, and you have to be a true believer in whatever that project is, there wasn't any of the bustle that I had come to expect from putting out a newspaper or a monthly magazine, I love the chaos of an office that is up against a deadline and youve got to do a whole lot of work, youve got to work sixteen hours a day, you get a little of that in film but only when you're in production and the gearing up period is tough.

TISCH: A lot of hurry up and wait.

LYNE: And so many things end up not being made, I can't tell you how many projects I worked on that are still in somebodys file some place, and that I found frustrating too. So I went back to journalism, it really ended up being almost a graduate school class for me, in the film business itself, and allowed me to come back and start a magazine about the movies and the movie business, called Premier.

TISCH: And that must've been an easy process to go from being in the business to doing a magazine about the business.

LYNE: It was great. I think there are moments when a market opens up, until VCRs were ubiquitous enough most movies were really sustained by young people viewing them. And I started Premier in 1986, which was just that moment when VCRs were everywhere, and suddenly you had a whole new audience for movies, and an educated audience for movies. And so we had a great time. (tape skips) I know that each time I've taken a job I bring everything I've learned, everything I was in those other jobs to bear on what the new challenge is, and that's the beauty of having long professional lives now, is that we get to have many stages.

TISCH: And then the transition to ABC, I know you dont plan for opportunities, youve been quoting as saying you just wait for things to happen.

LYNE: Well I did for a long time. I would listen to the inner voice that said, you know, It's time, I'm a little bored here, and then suddenly whatever opportunities were coming in at that moment I would take a lot more seriously. And in that case I had been doing Premier for about eight years, and Joe Roth, who was running the studio at Disney, asked me to come over first to Disney, and I worked at the studio with Joe for about two and a half years before I went over to ABC. And I really went to ABC because I thought Bob Iger was terrific, very smart, and I had a feeling that television was going to be more like journalism in the sense that it was an ongoing conversation with your viewer, you know, it was not a one shot, it was really an opportunity to get to know that customer and to really program for them.

TISCH: And you tried to bring culture to the masses, that was one of your endeavors while at ABC, were you successful in that?

LYNE: Well, you know, the first I guess three, four years I was there I was doing all of their long form, and we did some great projects, I think partly because I did not come out of television I was able to look at it with fresh eyes. We did a lot of musicals, Annie, Cinderella, Music Man, that really brought musical theater to a much broader audience, none of the studios were making musicals anymore, so it was a wide open opportunity. We did some great long form miniseries, we did Ann Frank, A Life, which was really the first time Ann Franks entire biography had been done, won lots of Emmys for it. We did "The Judy Garland Story, which again won lots of Emmys and was just a fantastic miniseries. Lots of things that I'm very, very proud of.

TISCH: What was your favorite project while you were at ABC?

LYNE: I loved pilot season, pilot season is about as much fun as anything I can imagine, because you're starting from scratch, you know, and you're listening to pitches and somebody has an idea, a vision, and you buy their vision and it becomes a script, and 90 percent of those dont live up to your expectations, a few do, you make those into pilots, they can go wrong so many different places, you know, you can cast them wrong, you can get the wrong director, but, you know, then there are those miracles that just seem to outstrip every expectation you ever had. And, you know, we did Desperate Housewives and Lost and Greys Anatomy in that final pilot season before I was asked to leave (laughs).

TISCH: Your departure from ABC was much bandied about in the press, and as you were being shown the door you put on the table Desperate Housewives, Lost and Greys Anatomy. When you are watching Channel 7 here in New York and you see an ad for Greys Anatomy or Desperate Housewives do you feel vindicated, do you feel like That's my show, you guys made a big mistake.

LYNE: I'm not a vindictive person, that's a big waste of time, I'm really happy Lloyd and I were able to leave something behind, Lloyd Braun was my partner in crime there, and was also fired at the same time I was. And I would hate to have left because I didn't get a long enough run there to do everything that I would've loved to do, I wouldve really hated to leave without feeling we actually had left something on the table. So that's nice. Ironically--

TISCH: But it must be great to be watching TV and see an ad for Desperate Housewives.

LYNE: It is great, it is great. It's very nice.

TISCH: To see the ladies on the cover week after week of people, and now Greys Anatomy is a huge hit, it's my sons favorite show on TV.

LYNE: Ah-huh.

TISCH: That must make you feel really good.

LYNE: It does, you know, the man who is currently running ABC, Steve McPherson, was running the studio at the time and was deeply involved in all those projects too, so he certainly deserves ownership as well. But it was fun, I had a great time doing it, I loved every day I did it, I've said that, I have no regrets about taking that job, I would do it all over again. And it was also useful as almost a wakeup call, you know, I think I had glided through life with very few obstacles to success and to be fired very publicly was actually a useful thing.

TISCH: Was it the only time youve been fired in your career?

LYNE: Absolutely, yeah.

TISCH: So then time passes, a few months go into a year and I would assume that there were many headhunters, there were many people coming your way, and you went on the board at Martha Stewart.

LYNE: I got a call from a headhunter about the board seat the day after I was fired, and I said at the time that if they had called me a day earlier I would've had to say no, because I wasn't allowed to be on public boards when I was in that job. And I had always admired Martha and the company was in a crisis, because of her legal problems, and I thought it would be a very interesting board to sit on, that I would learn something from it, and maybe I could bring something to the table. So I said yes, at the same time I was not thinking about taking a job here at all, I thought I would probably end up doing something much closer to the job that I left. But I had never taken time off in my entire career, from the time that I left school I had never taken off more than two weeks at a time, so I decided I was going to take the summer off. And it was extraordinary, I mean it was a wonderful, wonderful time for me, really a time when I was able to step back and to look at what was happening to all of these media businesses, what the impact of technology was going to be on them, and it was eye-opening, I don't think that I would be able to do the job I'm doing right now had I not had that time off. And I started thinking about what I was going to do, and I did start meeting with a lot of headhunters, and a lot of different companies, and I realized I was measuring a lot of them against what I saw here, this was a company that was very well built, and had a lot of interesting assets, despite all the problems at that moment. And I did feel like I understood what it could be, I have never shied away from a challenge, you know, when I took the job at ABC the network was in fourth place and we were the butt of the joke, didn't bother me in the least, I've always thought the much tougher job is coming into a company that is on top of the world and understanding how to lead at that moment. I think when a company is challenged having an outsider come in who's been able to look at it with clear eyes and see what's possible, even with those challenges, is very useful.

TISCH: Susan do you still consider yourself an editor, do you go through life with that editors mindset?

LYNE: Yeah, I think you do. One of the things we are trying to do across the board at this company, is to bring people edited selections, even one of the things we're doing for our new internet rebuild is to do edited search for people on the web, so that if you come to our site and you're looking for holiday decorating ideas, the first websites that pop up will be ones that our editors believe are the best, so that you're going to get a much better search result by doing it from our site. The question that I always heard when I first took this job was can the company survive, now the question is how big can this company grow. I think we're well past the survival issue, we have been lucky enough to go into partnership with a lot of great companies, we're going to start a Macys line next year, fourteen hundred different products that will be available in all eight hundred plus Macys across the country, we went into partnership with KB Home to build Martha Stewart communities, which is really fun. The company was built in a very smart way, in that we own all of our content, not just magazine content, but television content, and all of our patterns and all of our designs. So that really meant for me that we had a huge internet opportunity, huge new media opportunity, and we're in the midst of a rebuild and we will re-launch in the first quarter of next year, that I think is going to be enormously exciting in that lifestyle space. So there's a lot happening here, the magazines are doing stupendously, we did believe we had every indication that advertisers would come back after Martha got through with her Alderson sentence, and our customer never left. So the fact that there was that reader loyalty, that purchaser loyalty, I think had a big impact on our advertisers wanting to come back, and they have. So the magazines are back, is a profit center for us, we're launching a new magazine blueprint for a somewhat younger woman that has been successful in its first two issues and we have high hopes for it. So it's a really exciting time here at the company, a lot of creative work going on, and a lot of growth.

TISCH: It's very interesting because this season in particular we've had many of our guests talk about the convergence of their brand and technology. So in your particular case, where is that convergence going to come from the brand Martha Stewart and the technologies that we all have now at our fingertips?

LYNE: I think the first place you will see it is at MarthaStewart.com, all of our content is primarily evergreen, we do a lot of weddings content, home decorating, recipes, entertaining stories, holidays, we celebrate every holiday you could possibly imagine at this company, and the way they've been either written about in our magazines or shown to people on television is in very modular pieces, a lot of how to, a lot of instructions, very easily adapted to an internet site. We can make all of that information so much more accessible to people, we can give them a recipe and the video right next to it that shows them how to make it and a shopping list and all of it come up in a single search. The community sites that exist right now are primarily targeted to young users, and yet there are ninety million women online, a lot of them are between thirty and fifty, they're our target audience, and they're under-served. So the opportunity I think is huge to gather them and to give them everything they're looking for in one place.

TISCH: Susan when you first started you said the biggest asset that you have is Martha Stewart the brand, and Martha Stewart the person.

LYNE: Right, I still believe that.

TISCH: Are they one and the same?

LYNE: No, they actually aren't, you know, Martha Stewart the person is just such an extraordinary resource here, she is an unbelievable creative mind, she envisioned this company and then built it, and there is not a new product line, a new magazine launch, a new idea that does not benefit from her input here. Martha Stewart the brand I think is a whole different thing, I think that the twenty-five years, however long it's been Martha has been building equity with that customer, whether it's by giving them great information that is trustworthy, that has been tested, and that they can count on, or it's a Martha Stewart tag on a sheet set from Kmart, that that customer knows means will be of the highest quality they can get at that price point. And we saw even while Martha was in trouble, as I said, the readers didn't leave, and we still sold a billion dollars worth of product at Kmart. They separated Marthas personal legal issues from what the brand represented to them.

TISCH: Is it difficult running a company that is so identified with one individual?

LYNE: It has positives as well as negatives. Martha is just such a massive asset here, and having somebody who is not only that talented but also totally willing to get out there and work, to sell, to introduce people to a new idea, or a new concept, we do launch things far more successfully than most companies I know, largely because Marthas willing to get out there and talk about it. I think that you will see the company as we go forward trying to broaden our brands. So I think we have to be smart, we have to be cautious, we have to not veer off into businesses we have no right to be in, or have no equity in, but I think the way we've started, the way we've built over the past two years, I'm very confident we're going to be able to continue to expand and grow this company.

TISCH: You hear the term the democratization of style.

LYNE: Right.

TISCH: Is that what you're doing at Martha Stewart, are you offering to people who are coming from all income brackets the chance to have quality and order in their lives?

LYNE: Yes, absolutely, and I think Martha was a pioneer in that. There was a lot of horror in the minds of the design elite when Martha decided to do a Kmart line, but she did it with a very clear purpose, she did want to bring quality to all, she did not believe that just because you had only so much money to spend that you should not have access to products that were well designed, were stylish, and still affordable. And higher quality, she believed that there was not a ceiling on quality, or not a low ceiling on quality, and she demanded that Kmart look at their sourcing harder, really push to be able to deliver much better quality at that price point. And I think she educated a lot of people along the way, nobody talked about thread count before Martha went into Kmart.

TISCH: What would the Sixties Susan Lyne think of the Twenty-First Century Susan Lyne?

LYNE: Wow, I've never thought about that. I think she'd be pleased, I think that that Sixties Susan would be maybe a little surprised that I am so mainstream, (laughs) but happy nonetheless.

TISCH: Thank you.

LYNE: Thank you, it was fun.