Business Coaching

Had NBC been your business coaching client, what would you advise?

Lots of people have their opinion on the Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien-NBC debacle. Whether you’re on Team Coco or a longtime Leno fan, from a business perspective, did NBC make a good business decision?

Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC, gave O’Brien a contract to host The Late Show, something he’d waited for years to host, and yanked it away once the Leno “experiment” – Leno’s half hour show before the Late Show with Conan O’Brien – failed.

Zucker took a risk with the Leno show, and it failed. But where many people are finding fault are with the callousness in which he took back O’Brien’s contract.

So, was this a good business decision? Business coaching would tell us that ultimately, since Leno is the late-night meal ticket for NBC, it was a good decision…but the issue is in how the entire renegotiation (if you can even call it that) was handled.

Business coaches, would you have coached Zucker to do anything differently had he asked your advice on how to handle things? Could he have done anything differently to avoid the backlash NBC and Leno have ended up getting?

Tiger Woods publicly apologized to the nation today.

Tiger Woods gave his non-press conference this morning, and TV news stations and radio stations across the country broadcast his public apology across the nation.

But did this help him…or hurt him?

TV and radio commentators and millions of bloggers are ready to pounce with their reactions. And here’s a sampling of feelings felt around the world: some people felt the apology was sincere, some felt it was arrogant, some felt it was too long and redundant.

Was this a good move for Tiger? If we think about it from a business perspective, yes, it was.

Whenever anything negative happens to a company, the situations that were diffused fastest were when CEOs or an executive publicly apologized and answered questions. JetBlue, Toyota…it’s happened to the best of companies out there.

This situation is different, obviously, since Tiger is a person, not a company, and the press weren’t allowed to ask any questions at this conference. So what do readers think? How did you feel about this public apology, an effort to “save” Tiger’s brand?