What's in a Mogul?

Yes, I am alive. And I apologize for the radio silence. I was at All Things Digital last week and it was a lot of schmoozing until the wee hours of the morning combined with running around being all on-camera-reporter-y during the day. (I've been mulling a post on my love-hate relationship with the whole on camera thing, and if I'd written it, I'd link to it now to explain why the whole medium is endlessly more time-consuming and frustrating than just being a print reporter, even as it is also more rewarding. One day.)

At the end of the trip my boss's boss, Neeraj Khemlani, asked me to write a big think piece about D for Yahoo. A take-away about all the endless hallway chatter and late night conversations. It was a testament to D that most of it was actually about the conference program, but rather than discussing what the various high-powered keynoters were saying, it was more about the way they said it. It was like we were groupies talking about lead singers and Hollywood starlets.

As Neeraj and I talked about our impressions, I started to get an entirely new understanding on what it means to be a "mogul," which became the subject of my very, very long piece which you can read here.

It's utterly unlike anything I've  done for Tech Ticker, and even longer than a typical Valley Girl column. Yahoo Finance is running it on a good number of tech and media quote pages to test appetite for stories like these. It'll be interesting to see. I hope it does well as I put a lot of work into it, but also hope it doesn't as a quickie blog post is a lot easier to write! (Only half kidding! Witness my utter lack of blogging the last few days!)

To cut to the chase: I've always been so bored by the normal public-traded company executives. It's impossible to tease much humanity out of their endlessly lawyered and media-trained selves, and the human stories are what really excite me. This is largely why I love writing about startups and entrepreneurs. It always makes me sad to see entrepreneurs becoming less themselves, and usually, more bland. So whenever people talk about making someone more "polished" or "CEO-like" I scream about how that's the last thing an entrepreneur should do. Human is more interesting than plastic. Mark Zuckerberg -- even uttering single syllable answers-- is more interesting than Carly Fiorina. Any day. If you aren't naturally a Marc Benioff by all means don't fake it! That's just painful.

But what I'd forgotten about was the rare CEO that masters the art of being a true mogul. A Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs style mogul. Watching a parade of so-called "digital" CEOs there was a great discrepancy between founder-ceo-mogul. And as tech and media converge more and more, I can't help but think I was wrong about founders needs to inject a little showmanship into their shtick. Give us someone to love or hate or to love to hate. Jerry Yang and Rupert Murdoch have both made outrageous, bold business moves, but there's a difference with the market and employees willingness to listen to them.

Anyway, it's all laid out in the story if you want more. And I still feel conflicted about the idea of how important this is or isn't in terms of business. Let me put it this way: I'm convinced it's more important for a lasting company, because you need someone with guts and conviction and, let's say, political capital to make hard choices that invariably make a company stand the test of time. It's not just the ability to make a bold, controversial stance, it's selling it. There's a scene in my book where Digg is meeting with Fox and when Murdoch talks, the entire room shuts up. That's someone who could turn down a 60% acquisition premium and somehow keep everyone on board. But it still bothers me that just results aren't quite enough in the business world. And I think given the current pitfalls of being a public company CEO combined with how tech and media are converging, having that mogul-like presence is going to become increasingly important.

I guess the other question is whether great moguls are made or born. Was Murdoch so outspoken on any topic holding an audience in the palm of his hand when he was 20? Or is it that combination of money, success, confidence and being old enough he doesn't care about being polite or lawyered up anymore? Will Zuckerberg be one of these guys in his 80s?