This is a good one! If your mentors/the people who made your career warn you not to do something, you should think really, really hard about doing that thing!
- Know your workforce, Licht seemed completely oblivious to his staff and showed next to zero interest in any of them.
- Make yourself available to your team(open door policy) - Licht hid out on the 22nd floor and was intentionally difficult to find.
- Know your core customer - CNN is known as having bias against the political right, its audience skews very left. Licht having the debacle of a Trump town hall alienated its main constituency and further drove down ratings.
- Pick the right people for critical jobs - Having a heavy and controversial morning host in Don Lemon makes zero sense, people want mellow and light-hearted banter when they are waking up.
- Constantly bad mouthing the previous regime looks petty - Despite issues with CNN under Zucker it just looks bad and UN-professional to constantly put down ex-coworkers.
- Sometimes a ship is just going to go down - Leaders and managers love turning around bad companies and teams, but I think CNN is headed one way and its all downhill from here. Thanks to social media, partisan news channels(Fox/MSNBC) and just changing demographics(not as many people watch live TV anymore).