A revolutionary reign for NBC's media mogul
The orange-brown sofas, stippled walls and endless corridors of a low-slung 1970s campus in Connecticut seem implausible surroundings for a media mogul. Outside in the manicured grounds, a helicopter waits to fly the executive to his summer home on the elite island getaway of Nantucket, but inside there is none of the industry's usual first-name informality. "Mr Wright will see you now."
Last week, Bob Wright marked his 20th anniversary as chief executive of NBC with a surprise party at the top of its better-known offices in New York's Rockefeller Center. But it is from the incongruous base of General Electric's Fairfield headquarters that he has plotted the company's expansion over the past two decades.
His long tenure, during which the group has grown from a $3bn television network to a collection of cable channels, film studios and theme parks that should generate $16.5bn in revenues this year, has given Mr Wright an unusually sanguine perspective on challenges posed by what are loosely called "new media".
When he admits to having found a group of people in the company "that had been very insulated from all of the new media world", he means the team he inherited in 1986 after GE's $6.3bn acquisition of RCA, NBC's former parent. The new media in question were the expanding cable networks that had fascinated him since the 1970s, when the former lawyer ran Cox Cable Communications.
"One thing I would say, after my 20 years, is that most of the trends you see are legitimate," he says. "They're going to happen [but] most of the time periods people pick for these trends are too soon."
While investors in new companies exploiting such disruption wonder why they are not destroying old rivals faster, he says, those "on the defensive end" can take some comfort: "NBC is not going to collapse tomorrow."
Casual followers of NBC's recent history could be forgiven for asking the question. The core network slumped from first in the ratings to fourth, as a generation of popular shows
