a*********n
发帖数: 602 | 1 Yang Lam: From a chat show sofa to the corner office
The Chinese media industry is not for the faint-hearted. The combination of
an explosively-growing internet and rigid censorship puts anyone working in
the sector under both competitive and political pressures.
Yet Yang Lan never doubted where she wanted to be. Upon graduation from
Columbia University, she rejected an offer from a US network and returned to
China, where she soon had her own TV show. In 2000, she founded Sun Media
Group with her husband, the Hong Kong media mogul Bruno Wu – a move that
transformed China’s Oprah into its leading female media entrepreneur.
What Ms Yang had not expected, however, was that running her own business
would prove too big a challenge to handle by herself. Management required
skills different from those of a chat show host.
“After five years in business, I had a lot of confusion and frustration,”
says Ms Yang, now 41. “How to manage human resources is a big challenge for
me because in a media company, you have so many talents, and all of them
are very individualistic.”
“My [chief financial officer] was amazed at the fact that I cared so little
about how much money we were making but that I would be totally taken away
by the idea of perfection in the production,” she adds.
That is why she signed up for a CEO programme at China Europe International
Business School (Ceibs) in Shanghai in 2005.
Ceibs, set up as a joint venture between the Chinese government and the
European Commission in 1949, is the country’s premier international
business school.
Ms Yang credits the one-year, non-degree programme with giving her the
management knowledge she lacked, having studied English literature at
Beijing University and international affairs at Columbia . “I had to go
through some formal education in business management because I wanted to get
the company to grow,” she says. “I needed a certain discipline.”
Ms Yang admits to being fiercely competitive – a trait that took her to the
top of her class in both high school and university – and helped her
endure calculating company valuations despite a general lack of interest in
numbers.
But what she took away was an understanding of how to make her company work
to realise her dreams – with less enthusiasm and more planning.
“Don’t be carried away by interesting ideas – as is usually the case with
creative people,” she says. “I was like a one-man engine – I was running
ahead and hoping everybody else could automatically understand me and
follow my steps.”
At Ceibs, she says she learned the importance of communication and the risks
of losing the message through the layers of corporate organisation.
As a result, she set up a weekly meeting with top executives and middle
management: “Because I want everybody to be in line with where the company
is going.”
That direction is entirely her making. Two years ago, the group’s
investment operations were spun off into Red Rock Investment, which is now
headed by her husband, Mr Wu, while Ms Yang devotes herself to developing
Sun.
Past attempts by the group at participation in traditional media soured –
China Business Post, a regional newspaper in which Sun holds a stake – has
been suspended for almost a year following a controversy over its critical
reporting about a state bank. As a result, Ms Yang refocused the company on
running Her Village, a cross-media platform for urban professional women.
The combination of a website, online broadcasting, an online magazine and
offline events has given her unrivaled access to the target group, which she
plans to use to build a full-blown online television channel three years
from now.
The business model has created stable advertising streams. The platform
allows for flexible ad formats with space for more customers at lower prices
– things that do not work with the chat show Ms Yang still produces and
hosts for China Central Television, the main state broadcaster.
To make her plans work, she reorganised Sun Media Group after her Ceibs
programme. The main obstacle, she felt, was the conflict between marketing
and production. Staff working on programme content resented any attempt to
make the programme meet commercial goals – exactly what marketing staff
were trying to do.
To solve this, she moved production and marketing offices from different
floors, right next to each other, and assigned marketing managers to work
with specific production units, “so they have the chance to build a long-
standing partnership”, she says.
To further overcome resistance, she restructured the bonus system so the two
sides get a bonus only if they work towards each other’s goals, at least
to a certain extent.
This fine-tuning, however, has not changed the fact that Ms Yang is the
driving force behind every step her company takes and that she treats her
business as a personal achievement and part of her life, rather than just a
professional task.
This, she makes clear, is deeply rooted in her upbringing. “On the day of
my college graduation, my parents told me: Lanlan, you are on your own now,
” she recalls. “They taught me that happiness is never given to you but
has to be pursued.”
While that message left the young woman feeling tearful, helpless and
hopeless in 1990, it did give her the steel to cope with the challenges to
come.
“I am the major inspiration for my employees because my idea of building up
a media company in a rather complicated situation in China places many
challenges. And you have to be reminded, every now and then, to have enough
courage to carry on.” |
