EXCLUSIVE: How my experience as CEO of ninemsn profoundly changed my mindset
In this exclusive excerpt from his upcoming book, Through Shifts and Shocks, former Microsoft ANZ CEO, Steve Vamos, shares experiences - good and bad - from his time as the CEO of ninemsn.
Founded in November 1997 as a joint venture (JV) between Kerry Packer’s Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL) and Bill Gates’ Microsoft, ninemsn had resources that most start-up CEOs could only dream of. The vision for ninemsn was to build an online presence for the group’s magazine titles and Channel Nine television programs, and to provide the entry point for Microsoft’s consumer online services into Australia, including Hotmail, Messenger and Search.
I joined the business as CEO in March 1998. The joint venture was born with plenty of money (with a commitment of $50 million funding from each partner), access to the best technology available at the time, and a bunch of smart people who were hired from leading media, technology and communications companies.
An accomplished group of experienced industry executives had been assembled, their success reflected in the luxury cars parked behind our Paddington office. Both JV parties assigned the online rights to pretty much all their respective businesses to the joint venture; ninemsn had everything (money, technology, smart people and highly recognisable media brands) that you could imagine and reasonably want in any online start-up at the time. What ninemsn did not have at its birth were the human and relationship bonds or structures of an established business.
The day I started my personal assistant Annette warned me that the place was in desperate need of adult supervision. One of the first staff issues I had to resolve was dealing with disappointment from several of our team members that we were not going to shut down the company for a few days for the annual Mardi Gras celebrations.
The company was just a few months old, had quickly hired about a hundred people, and had little or no structure or discipline. In 1998 there was no online media advertising industry, and no playbook for how to run an online media business. For the first time in my career, I was leading a business that had no established culture or ways of doing things. To top it off, I had no knowledge or experience of the media and advertising industries. I was running a business in an industry I knew very little about.
In my first year as CEO I went to every meeting as the person who knew least about the subject matter being discussed. All I could do was shut up and listen, consider what I was hearing, then play back what I’d heard about the problems we were facing and suggest ways to overcome them. I also saw how the various players on the team behaved with each other, who was making a constructive contribution and who was getting in the way of progress.
Out of necessity and as a by-product of my limited domain expertise, I moved into the role of ‘connector and enabler’ of others. I became obsessed with ironing out the issues and misalignments that got in the way of people doing their best work. The payback was immense.
There’s a saying: ‘The fish don’t see the water in the tank.’ The intangibles that bind organisations, the things you can’t touch or see, tend to be taken for granted. At ninemsn, given my lack of domain expertise, all I could do was try to ‘see the water’ and make it cleaner and clearer for our people.
In early 2002, almost four years into the journey, we had survived the dotcom crash and emerged as the online media industry leader of the time. Around that time, as I sat alone in my office leaning back in my chair and gazing at a blank wall, the realisation hit me that having little domain experience in media and advertising, the core of the ninemsn business, had been a blessing in disguise. The focus I had on helping others rather than exercising my individual skills had led to our creating a great team in a business that was growing fast and was loved by the people working in it.
For the first time in my career, I truly appreciated the importance of the human dimension of business and the value of intense focus on how people in an organisation work together.
Organisation leaders tend to overrate their knowledge and importance and underappreciate the critical role they play in enabling the success of others. They generally spend too much time doing what the business does, rather than immersing themselves in how it is done. As a result, the hard prioritisation and people misalignments that exist in organisations are not dealt with quickly enough, or at all.
My first three years at ninemsn were nothing but hard work, difficult conversations and hard choices. Changing times demand tremendous focus on connecting with, caring for and enabling people to embrace change, and committing to eliminate obstacles to their performance and success.
There could be no better illustration of the futility of a control mindset in times of change than the situation so many of us confronted with the initial impact of the COVID pandemic in early 2020. No one had any idea how things were going to pan out. My message to our people at Xero was simple: ‘Do the best you can to keep things at work moving while at the same time looking after yourself and your family.’
I received a lot of positive feedback from people who were relieved to hear that message, because I handed them control over their situation, rather than pretending I could tell them what to do or control their approach to work. To all our communities, internal and external, the message was that we needed to stay connected, and share our experiences and learning, to get through the uncertainty and change confronting us. Let’s face it, it’s impossible to control things when they are changing around you.
Through Shifts and Shocks is set for release on 27 November via Wiley.
Keep up to date with the latest in media and marketing
Worked with/for Steve Vamos for a few years. Really genuine, warm guy, always willing to listen and seemed genuinely concerned for people.
User ID not verified.