America's Best Leaders: Q&A with Brian Lamb, president and CEO of C-SPAN
Who's the leader past or present who's inspired you most?
There is no one; there are many. I would say that more than anything else I have learned from my chairmen, my bosses over the years. I've had 15 of them over the last 26 years, and I've learned something from every one of them—you know, you learn compromise from one; you learn the ability to delegate from another; you learn how to spend money correctly from another.
I think of major American leaders—I've studied a lot about the presidents, and I've picked up lots of little things from the presidents. I've interviewed most presidents since Lyndon Johnson—I think I've interviewed all of them since Lyndon Johnson—and they're fascinating creatures. You know, they're the most studied people in our country, every word and all that stuff, and so you can't help but watching them and their philosophies.
Ronald Reagan used to have this little plaque on his desk that said–and I don't remember the exact quote–"No telling how much you can get accomplished if you don't care who gets the credit." I've used that; I just find that to be incredibly important. I haven't been perfect about it, but I've used it. Bill Clinton had an interesting habit, when I would interview him, of stopping, and thinking through—he would sit in front of you for 30 seconds without answering the question. I thought that was terrific, not to have to have an answer immediately.
I've watched all the presidents, for instance—and I haven't done a good job of this—their ability to get away from the center of the activity, and that's a very important thing to learn. Ronald Reagan did it. Bill Clinton did it—he never had a place to go to. George [W.] Bush has been away more than anybody else. And they get criticized for it quite a lot by people who don't like them. But your head can be very muddled right in the middle of Washington, D.C., and being surrounded by people who do nothing all day but tell you how good you are. We've played the Lyndon Johnson tapes for the last seven years on our radio station, and you learn a lot just by listening to his engagement. He engaged people like crazy. Presidents are interesting; I've enjoyed the study of presidents.
What [do] you look for when you're hiring people?
In a place like this, what you first look for is, are they political? Are they wearing their feelings on their sleeve? And do they come to this with a chip on their shoulder or a bias or all that stuff? You can figure it out pretty quickly—it shows. . . . Somebody who walks in here and they're cocky and they've got opinions and all that stuff, you know you'll get trouble right out the box. . . .
We have a lot of women that run things here. I've always been very pleased that we were able to be one of those companies at least 26 years ago that had a lot of women in leadership positions, because it's the new company. We have two chief operating officers and one's a man, one's a woman, and they both earned it, and they both get along beautifully, but they have different traits. But they run the company. Susan Swain and Rob Kennedy.
You also look for attitude about just life in general. I think in order to work successfully here you have to get along with each other. You know, we only have 255 employees and we put a lot of restrictions on people (for instance, their political views), and that's hard because think about where they're coming from—a political institution that reflects the United States' political attitude at any given time, political culture, and they're told to keep it to themselves. So you said understand it, but keep it to yourself, so you're looking for a certain kind of person that doesn't have an axe to grind. And bright. The more history they understand, the better they are. And an enormous number of people that lead this place today started here 26 years ago, or 25 years ago, and today they're 45 years old, they're vice presidents, and they run the place. And they created it. And that was fun to watch, and at some point along the way I had to step back completely and say, all right, you're putting together an education department, do it yourself; you're putting together a field organization with camera people, all that stuff, you figure it out. So they built, and so they take ownership.
In this leadership business you can spew a lot of clichés. It's very easy to have a great deal of theory. But I've found that the more ownership someone can take, they more likely they're going to do a superb job.
Jim Collins [author of Built to Last and Good to Great] endorses an idea for companies that has some formal mechanism set up to review projects that you've just done, the idea being to extract lessons from them that you can then apply later. Do you have any sort of review mechanism within C-SPAN?
We have a significant review process, internally. Every employee is reviewed every year; every project is reviewed every time we do it. I think most people here really like that. I didn't invent this, Susan [Swain] and Rob [Kennedy, C-SPAN's two chief operating officers], invented this, and again, that's one of those things—I look at it almost in bewilderment, saying, how do you do that? I mean I have either fortunately or unfortunately been away from that process, so I've watched it from afar, and it seems to work.
Can you remember any specific change that's come about because of it?
Yeah. We've done a lot of major projects, and we've reviewed how much money do we spend, do we need all those people . . . . I would say more than anything else out of it has come over the years that we've added more people than we thought we need in future projects just because. Plus I think that more than anything else in a world of technology, we have changed dramatically there where we have a lot more technology available than we used to have. At C-SPAN we used to do it with too little technology, and now we have a lot more—not significantly more than we need, but more than we need, so that we don't find ourselves with failure. Technology failure in this business is a real problem.
Another point that Jim Collins made has to do with whether not as a company was getting better and better . . . there was some kind of breakthrough moment where the people running the company looked back at that and thought wow, here was this one particular breakthrough. Has that happened with C-SPAN?
Oh, yeah. I think this is complicated for the average viewer to understand because it seems so easy, but the year that we got (which was 1982) a full-time satellite—they call them transponders, but a channel on the satellite—and that our industry agreed to pay for that, and agreed to allow us to do 24 hours a day, seven days a week, was a major breakthrough.
Technology all through the years has been a tremendous breakthrough, where cameras became less expensive, microwave gear became less expensive, satellite gear became less expensive. More than anything else we've been affected here by technology. I'll give you one tiny-sounding little technology change that we use that for the audience was a major breakthrough. And that was–and it's been a long time ago, I can't remember, 15 years ago or so–we noticed that all the witnesses before committees on Capitol Hill were only—our cameras were set up on the side and all you would see is the side of people's faces, and we didn't like that. And so we looked for ways to change it. And it was the creation of robotic cameras that allowed us to put a camera in front of the witness and not interfere with the committee. That was a huge breakthrough, because now the audience always sees—and all the other networks take our stuff from Capitol Hill all the time—the audience now sees the frontal picture of a human being, and that was—I don't know the exact date, but that date was a major breakthrough for the audience. And it was all internal here, where we all said, we've got to solve this problem. And Capitol Hill often doesn't work with you on these things, and they didn't want a human being sitting in front of the committee operating a camera. . . . I think it's huge for the audience because now almost never do you see anything but the face of witnesses.
With all the demands on your time, how do you organize your day?
My job is a lot easier today than it ever has been because the basic daily, hourly activities are run by somebody else. . . . I have time to do things, and it's not a crazy place at this stage. I'll be 64 next month [October 2005]. And you know I don't want to kill myself in the job. Some people want to be dragged out with their boots on; that's not my goal. My goal at this point is that we stay on mission, and that I'm as supportive as I can be of people who're knocking themselves out here all the time and pay attention to what they do and try to, if we've slipped a little bit, catch it. But . . . these folks here know what they're doing now . . . I don't want to sound like I'm the father figure, but they really do know what they're doing, and they don't need me to tell them what they're doing. So I try to stay away from them. There was a time when I would be . . . pretty apoplectic when things weren't going right, but they figured it out. They're as concerned about it as I ever was now, let's put it that way.
The great leaders know their deficiencies can't be ignored. What are yours, and how do you address them?
I have them. You bet! I have been accused of having a short attention span. I've learned to get away from that somewhat. . . . I sometimes jump to conclusions about what's wrong with a problem, when if I wait a little bit longer I'll find out that my first instincts weren't right. This is both an asset and a deficit: In jumping to conclusions and being wrong, I have to back down because all of a sudden I've said, 'Oh, I know why they're doing that,' and it turns out they've not done it. I'm somewhat of a—I have to fight cynicism, based on being in Washington for 40 years. It's a constant fight, I'm not kidding you, and people who know me know that it's very hard because it's easy to assign motives to people based on what is actually going on.
What are the biggest risks that you've taken?
Well, actually, it's interesting; I've always felt that the risks weren't very significant, because no one knew who I was and I didn't have a reputation to uphold. And so if I failed, so what? I've often thought that it would be easier for my kind of person to do this than somebody who had a big name, because they're always finding their public image, and I've never had a public image.
Everybody said this place couldn't work, in the beginning, and I suppose it's like anything, that was somewhat of a risk, but I never thought it was a risk—I never doubted it, and that's probably one asset that I have: I had a job to do, and I would do anything to succeed. I could have been proven wrong.
It's not there yet, it's still—it's not a perfect success; as [former C-SPAN board chairman] Ed Allen would say, there's still some systems to carry us. And that's the only measure of success, when you don't make money for somebody, you don't have advertisers, it's just, is it available? And we're in 90 million homes; we started with 3½. And the second network's almost 80 million, so you don't want to shortchange it.
But it's been, I think, more than anything else–and I would really like this to show up in your piece somewhere–this was not a one-man band ever, after the first couple of months. And it would not have succeeded and will not continue without an incredible number of people acting cooperatively. That's the success of this place. There are hundreds and sometimes thousands of people involved in making it work, because on the surface it's not going to make it in a commercial society, period. There's no taxpayer money, not one dime of taxpayer money, it's all been done by private industry; it's not required to be carried by the federal government, and the amazing part of the success is that all these different people that I've mentioned to you—the staff here, my board members, the public outside, have all come together to make it work and do its job. It's not the most important job being done in the world; it's just a job that now fits nicely into the smorgasbord of everything else.
What were the most difficult moments for you as you went through the last 25 years, and what got you through the difficult bits?
That's so easy. The single most difficult moments all sound alike: when some system or systems in America would take C-SPAN off. The single most difficult moments. It's like you felt at some point—there was a point back in 1982 where we lost 400 cable systems overnight because we switched satellites. Very painful. Very difficult. And you weren't ever sure you were really going to get them back. And it turned out that the public's reaction was the most significant, because if the public ever gets it, they don't want to give it up. The only other difficult moments would revolve around–our board has done a great job over the years—you've got to put this in context–of giving us the money we needed to operate. We're given a $50 million-a-year budget, and that in television is nothing. But it's what we need; they will give us what we need. The money thing has not been the issue, the issue's been one thing: carriage of these channels on cable. It's the most important issue, and the most painful part of the existence is when they would drop us somewhere. -Peter Meredith