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The Price of Charlie Sheen’s Radio Tirade

The LA Times tabulates exactly how much money Charlie Sheen’s on-air meltdown MIGHT cost Warner Bros. in the form of lost royalties and fees from Two and a Half Men episodes:

Warner Bros., which produces the show, has the most to lose if “Two and a Half Men” is over. Currently, CBS pays about $4 million per episode for the show. Warner Bros. uses that money to make the show, pay the cast, etc. But there is always money left over to keep in its pocket. Given that eight episodes won’t be made this season, that translates to $32 million in lost license fees, several million of which would have been pure profit. People close to the show say Warner Bros. would lose about $10 million in profits from the four episodes alone

Contractually, CBS is on the hook for one more season after this one, so if Sheen’s character has indeed drank his whiskey and bedded his last broad, then that is an additional $96 million or so in license fees gone — assuming that 24 episodes would be made next season. Then there is the rerun money. The cable channel FX pays about $800,000 per episode. That’s $3.2 million right there that’s gone for the episodes that won’t be made this season. If the show is gone for good, then that number jumps to more than $22 million after factoring in the 24 episodes that would have been made next season.

Just based on the numbers above, they are already looking at well over $130 million in losses, assuming the show gets canceled. That this many livelihoods and this much money can be subject to the whims of one notoriously unstable man seems the height of ridiculousness. But hey, that’s show business baby.

Tina Fey on Feminism and Comedy

Jezebel’s piece from awhile back about the lack of female talent at The Daily Show really must have struck a nerve with Tina Fey. Fey devoted a substantial amount of time to addressing some of its criticisms in last night’s episode, and Rebecca Traitster at Salon has written up a staggeringly insightful response to it that describes how Fey manages to have her cake and eat it too:

Mesmerizingly, practically the whole half hour of network television was dedicated to slicing and dicing nearly every angle of the arguments that crop up any time anyone tries to talk about gender, popularity and perception. It was a testament to the fact that these arguments have been cropping up ever more frequently in recent years, thanks in no small part to the ascension of Fey and her generation of talented (and very often beautiful) comedians, as well as the rise of a critical and popular feminist-minded blogosphere that keeps a celebratory and often cutting eye on the gender history being made in media, politics and entertainment.

Emily Nussbaum also has some background details in her write up over at New York.

How Realistic is ‘The King’s Speech’?

Nathan Heller has written one of the most powerful, moving pieces of 2011 (already!) by describing The King’s Speech through the eyes of a stutterer:

Stuttering, in my mind, is a word that conjures beiges and grays: the feeling of always being lusterless and square in conversation; of woozy headaches brought about by gasping through my sentences; of childhood boredom in stuffy, cork-tiled offices where speech therapists told me to slow down and read long lists of words aloud. Somehow, I never wanted to slow down, and still don’t; and in this respect stuttering also signifies a bargain I have spent adult life trying not to make. The disorder is not what might be called “a given” from birth for me, though it’s been a looming specter for as long as my memory reaches. I started speaking in sentences shortly before turning 1. At 3, those sentences first met with some resistance on my tongue, the way a car moves off asphalt, onto dirt—and then, finally, across rocks that jolt the tires and make it hard to track where you are headed. Today, I am still being jolted, and the jagged terrain behind bears the track marks of my own innumerable small humiliations. In the seventh grade: A substitute asks the class to read out loud, and when I stumble over my first sentence, she inquires of the other students whether I’m “OK” and “always like this,” and while I continue fighting with a pr sound, my ears tune in to every judging shudder in the room—the creaking chairs, the restless exhalations, the uncomfortable shifting, in the desk beside me, of a girl with many colored pens who seems to me in some way very beautiful. In high school: A medical assistant taking down my charts asks whether I just have a problem with my speech or whether there is mental retardation, too. (“As far as I’m aware …” my answer begins.) In college: I slow down several seminars trundling through fragile language meant for clever tongues. And so on. In each case, what I feel most impelled to explain to the people who can hear me is just: This is not my voice.

A Q&A with the Creators of IBM’s Watson

Reddit has a fascinating Q&A with the guys who created the machine that will one day enslave us all, AKA Watson. The most interesting part of this discussion is how Watson interacted with the buzzer. I’ve seen lots of accusation on the internetz about how unfair it was that humans were being pitted against a machine in terms of knowledge AND response time. Here’s what the creators had to say:

Jeopardy! and IBM tried to ensure that both humans and machines had equivalent interfaces to the game. For example, they both had to press down on the same physical buzzer. IBM had to develop a mechanical device that grips and physically pushes the button. Any given player however has different strengths and weakness relative to his/her/its competitors. Ken had a fast hand relative to his competitors and dominated many games because he had the right combination of language understanding, knowledge, confidence, strategy and speed. Everyone knows you need ALL these elements to be a Jeopardy! champion.

Both machine and human got the same clues at the same time — they read differently, they think differently, they play differently, they buzz differently but no player had an unfair advantage over the other in terms of how they interfaced with the game. If anything the human players could hear the clue being read and could anticipate when the buzzer would enable. This allowed them the ability to buzz in almost instantly and considerably faster than Watson’s fastest buzz. By timing the buzz just right like this, humans could beat Watson’s fastest reaction. At the same time, one of Watson’s strength was its consistently fast buzz — only effective of course if it could understand the question in time, compute the answer and confidence and decide to buzz in before it was too late.

The clues are in English — Brad and Ken’s native language; not Watson’s. Watson analyzes the clue in natural language to understand what the clue is asking for. Once it has done that, it must sift through the equivalent of one million books to calculate an accurate response in 2-3 seconds and determine if it’s confident enough to buzz in, because in Jeopardy! you lose money if you buzz in and respond incorrectly. This is a huge challenge, especially because humans tend to know what they know and know what they don’t know. Watson has to do thousands of calculations before it knows what it knows and what it doesn’t. The calculating of confidence based on evidence is a new technological capability that is going to be very significant in helping people in business and their personal lives, as it means a computer will be able to not only provide humans with suggested answers, but also provide an explanation of where the answers came from and why they seem correct.

Also, this:

Watson contains state-of-the-art parallel processing capabilities that allow it to run multiple hypotheses – around one million calculations – at the same time. Watson is running on 2,880 processor cores simultaneously, while your laptop likely contains four cores, of which perhaps two are used concurrently. Processing natural language is scientifically very difficult because there are many different ways the same information can be expressed. That means that Watson has to look at the data from scores of perspectives and combine and contrast the results. The parallel processing power provided by IBM Power 750 systems allows Watson to do thousands of analytical tasks simultaneously to come up with the best answer in under three seconds.

The Case Against Federal Funding for Public Broadcasting

Alan Mutter argues compellingly about why PBS and NPR should man up and stop taking federal funding:

Although the loss of federal largesse initially would stress the nation’s 368 public television stations and 934 public radio outlets, these generally well-funded, well-known and well-established organizations for the most part could carry on, because only 15% of their backing on average comes from Uncle Sam. While an instant 15% drop in revenues would ruin anyone’s day, it pales against, say, the nearly 50% plunge that newspapers have suffered in ad sales in the last five years.

So, yes, public broadcasters would have to retrench. Yes, they would have to step up fund-raising from foundations, from corporations and from listeners and viewers like us. And, yes, that would mean more pledge breaks. But it would be worth it, because public broadcasters would gain the independence they – and viewers and listeners like us – deserve. Once and for all, the broadcasters could concentrate on broadcasting, instead of worrying about the next budgetary challenge from Capitol Hill or the White House.

/Film and The /Filmcast Improve People’s Lives

In the past two weeks, I’ve received news from two colleagues on how their association with my work at /Film has helped to provide them some valuable professional connections:

  • My friend Dan Trachtenberg is now represented by the super-prestigious Great Guns talent agency in the UK. The Great Guns rep first heard of Dan on our “Top Soundtracks of 2010” podcast, in which Dan casually mentioned that he’s a commercial director. This off-handed remark led to a contract being signed between the two of them. Congratulations, Dan! 
  • A while ago, I interviewed Gen Ip, the creator of the amazing Filmography 2010 video. Last week, I received an e-mail from a major trailer-editing company in LA, which actually cut several of the trailers in the video! The representative was looking to hire and asked me if I could connect him with Gen Ip. After checking with Gen, I e-introduced the two of them this morning. I assume great things will come of it.

I’m grateful that the platforms I’ve worked in can provide people with new and exciting opportunities. It’s a testament to the caliber of our listenership and readership that these opportunities exist. It’s also a sign of the sheer talent and greatness of the people willing to associate themselves with /Film and the /Filmcast.

So there you have it folks! Agreeing to talk with me will clearly improve your professional life in ways you can only dream of. Just know that my door is always open. Because seriously, it’s so lonely over here…

In Which I Receive An Award For Something I Wrote

The ecch, “a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the case method of learning,” has just handed out its yearly awards for excellence in case-writing (for those of you who have no idea what “cases” are, go here for more info). This year’s award recipients include a case I helped to write about Facebook and its “Connect” Platform, which is currently taught at Harvard Business School’s MBA program. Here’s the full press release:


21st ecch case awards go global: winners represent three continents

The winners of the first global ecch Case Awards (succeeding the annual European Case Awards) have been announced.

Harvard Business School, where the case method was first developed, was victorious in four categories and also scooped the overall award with Apple Inc. in 2010 by David B Yoffie and Renee Kim.

One new award and two new case writing competitions were added to the traditional ten categories*. 

Outstanding contribution to the case method was awarded to Kamran Kashani, Professor of Marketing and Global Strategy at IMD (for full biography see notes for editors below). 

Case writing competition new case writer was won by Franco Quillico and Gregory Moscato,International University of Monaco, (a first time win for their school) with their case Tango vs Victor, a case about the proposed acquisition of a French soft drinks company by a pan-European private equity fund. 

Case writing competition ‘hot topic’ case: This year’s subject, Renewable and sustainable energy, technology and development, was won by George Kohlrieser, Francisco Szekely and Sophie Coughlan from IMD with their new case Playing to Win: Leadership and Sustainability at ESB Electric Utility a case about a 95% publically owned Irish utility’s plan to become carbon neutral by 2035 while remaining competitive. 

IMD also won awards in two further categories: Production and Operations Management, and Marketing, with the latter being won with a case authored by Kamran Kashani himself, together with Inna Francis. 

London Business School was the third European School to be represented among the winners taking the Human Resource Management / Organisational Behaviour category with the case Richard Murphy and the Biscuit Company (A) by Michael Jarrett and Kyle Ingram. 

Thunderbird School of Global Management was the second US school to make a first-time winning appearance, scooping the Finance, Accounting and Control category with the case Southwest Airlines 2008 by Andrew C Inkpen. 

The Indian based IBS Center for Management Research, scored a first for Asia by winning the Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management category with the case Knowledge Management Initiatives at IBM by Vivek Gupta, Indu Perepu and Sachin Govind. 

Commenting on his award, Kamran Kashani was “honoured and humbled” to be selected by ecch’s executive committee to be the first-ever winner of the Outstanding contribution to the case method award. “This takes a special place in my 37 years as a management educator, because, for me, the case method isn’t just a pedagogical ‘tool’ but represents the fundamental position I take towards my students: it is a respect for their points of view and a profound belief in their capacity to learn from each other.”

Richard McCracken, Director of ecch said “The new 2011 Case Awards are a resounding endorsement of what we hoped to achieve by making them global, delivering winners from three continents in the first year. The results in the new case writing competition categories have demonstrated that case writing is flourishing worldwide. We were delighted with the response, receiving a remarkable 120 entries from 103 places of learning in 29 countries.” 

The hot topic identified by the ecch Executive Committee for the 2011/12 case writing competition will beSocial Media and Change, looking for cases that focus on how companies are using social media in their business development and strategy formulation. (Entry details at: www.ecch.com/casecompetition) 

For further press information please contact:
Emma Simmons: e.simmons@ecch.com

* Overall winner; Economics, Politics and Business Environment; Entrepreneurship; Ethics and Social Responsibility; Finance, Accounting and Control; Human Resource Management / Organisational Behaviour; Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management; Marketing; Production and Operations Management; Strategy and General Management 

The results in full

Outstanding contribution to the case method
Professor Kamran Kashani, IMD 

Overall winner
Apple Inc. in 2010
David B Yoffie and Renee Kim
Harvard Business School
Ref no 9-710-467 

Economics, Politics and Business Environment
Philips versus Matsushita: The Competitive Battle Continues
Christopher A Bartlett
Harvard Business School
Ref no 9-910-410 

Entrepreneurship
Facebook’s Platforms
Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Thomas R Eisenmann, David Chen and Brian Feinstein
Harvard Business School
Ref no 9-808-128 

Ethics and Social Responsibility
IKEA’s Global Sourcing Challenge: Indian Rugs and Child Labor (A)
Christopher A Bartlett, Vincent Dessain and Anders Sjöman 
Harvard Business School
Ref no 9-906-414 

Finance, Accounting and Control
Southwest Airlines 2008
Andrew C Inkpen
Thunderbird School of Global Management
Ref no A07-08-0008 

Human Resource Management / Organisational Behaviour
Richard Murphy and the Biscuit Company (A)
Michael Jarrett and Kyle Ingram 
London Business School
Ref no 408-083-1 

Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management
Knowledge Management Initiatives at IBM
Vivek Gupta, Indu Perepu and Sachin Govind 
IBS Center for Management Research
Ref no 909-018-1 

Marketing
Xiameter: The Past and Future of a ‘Disruptive Innovation’
Kamran Kashani and Inna Francis 
IMD
Ref no IMD-5-0702 

Production and Operations Management
Lego: Consolidating Distribution (A)
Carlos Cordon, Ralf W Seifert and Edwin Wellian 
IMD
Ref no IMD-6-0315 

Strategy and General Management
Google Inc.
Benjamin Edelman and Thomas R Eisenmann 
Harvard Business School
Ref no 9-910-036 

Case writing competion ‘Hot topic’: Renewable and sustainable energy, technology and development
Playing to Win: Leadership and Sustainability at ESB Electric Utility
George Kohlrieser, Francisco Szekely and Sophie Coughlan
IMD
Ref no IMD-4-0302

Case writing competition: New case writer
Tango vs Victor (A & B)
Franco Quillico and Gregory Moscato
International University of Monaco
Ref no 110-062-1 and 110-063-1

Notes for editors

ecch is the largest single source of management case studies in the world, with more than 68,000 items in its catalogue, available through www.ecch.com. An independent, membership-based, non-profit organisation, ecch has offices at Cranfield University, UK and Babson College, USA. ecch is dedicated to supporting authors and users of case studies and promoting the case method of learning. It provides the interface between the authors of cases and the educational institutions and businesses that use them for teaching and learning. ecch has an international programme of case writing and teaching workshops and events. 

ecch Case Awards are presented annually to recognise worldwide excellence in case writing and to raise the profile of the case method of learning. The Awards (formerly the European Case Awards) have been presented since 1991. Awards are made in up to nine management categories; for one overall winning case; two case writing competition categories for a case by a new author and for a newly authored case on a ‘hot topic’; and to recognise the outstanding contribution of an individual associated with the case method. www.ecch.com/caseawards 

Outstanding contribution to the case method: Nominations are collected by ecch and the executive committee, and the committee votes for a winner from the shortlist. 

Kamran Kashani is Professor of Marketing and Global Strategy at IMD. He teaches topics in marketing, strategy and innovation. He is currently researching marketing innovation in large global companies. An Iranian and Swiss national, he graduated from the University of California, UCLA, and gained his Doctorate in Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Professor Kashani’s articles and books in marketing and management have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is the winner of several awards for best paper and case writing. He has researched and written more than 50 case studies and has won four ecch Case Awards (marketing category 2011, 2001, 1995 (runner up) and 1993) and two EFMD awards (marketing category 2005 and 2003). As a coach to teachers in the art of case method, Professor Kashani has been presenting ecch case writing and teaching workshops workshops since 2000, reaching over 220 educators worldwide. He has been a faculty member of ITP (International Teachers Program) at London Business School, UK, New York University, USA, SDA Bocconi, Italy and IMD, Switzerland where he co-directed the programme. kashani@imd.ch

Case awards and competition judging criteria 
ecch identifies winning cases through an objective process – cases are judged anonymously. 

Overall winner and nine category winners: All cases registered with ecch during the last five years are put forward for consideration. The winning case in each category is the one that has achieved the highest growth in popularity among peers worldwide, based on the number of individual organisations ordering and teaching the case during the last calendar year. A case that has won a category award in a previous year cannot win again, but is eligible, once, for the overall award (eg the 2010 overall award winning case won the marketing category in 2009). 

Case writing competition categories: All submissions must have been tested in the classroom, completed in the specified time frame and be in English. They may be compiled from field research, published sources or generalised experience. Authors may submit a single case or a case series. The case, or case series, must be a maximum of 5,000 words, excluding exhibits and annexes. Each submission must be accompanied by a teaching note for which there is no word limit. 

Hot topic: For 2011 cases were invited that feature a business situation within the area of ‘Renewable and sustainable energy, technology and development’. Judging panel members:

  • Stephen Evans, Professor of Life Cycle Engineering, Cranfield University, UK
  • Michiel Leenders, Professor Emeritus, Richard Ivey School of Business, Canada
  • Richard McCracken (Chairman), Director, ecch, UK
  • Stuart Read, Professor of Marketing, IMD, Switzerland
  • Giselle Weybrecht, Author of The Sustainable MBA: The Manager’s Guide to Green Businesswww.thesustainablemba.com
New case writer: Submissions must be the first teaching case in any business subject area, prepared by the author(s) in a format that can be used by other case teachers. Judging panel members:
  • Jamie Anderson, Professor of Strategic Management, TiasNimbus Business School, The Netherlands
  • Geoff Easton, Professor of Marketing, Lancaster University Management School, UK
  • Jim Erskine, Professor Emeritus, Richard Ivey School of Business, Canada
  • Kamran Kashani, Professor of Marketing and Global Strategy, IMD, Switzerland
  • Richard McCracken (Chairman), Director, ecch, UK

The case method of learning was pioneered in the early 20th Century at Harvard University. It has become the favoured teaching method of most of the world’s leading business schools.