In search of Leadership: from 'Moose' issues at the New York Times to women on Corporate Boards (page 1 of 3)

Already facing the worst advertising decline since 1938, the Times managed to publish on Sept. 12, get through subsequent anthrax threats and go on to win seven Pulitzer Prizes this spring, more than double the previous record of any newspaper.

"Our response was driven by core values that had been created and enunciated long before those planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon," said Sulzberger during the annual Wharton Leadership Conference titled, "Leading in All Directions." The conference, organized by the school's Center for Leadership and Change Management and the Center for Human Resources, also included speeches by management experts, mountain climbers and a magician.

For Sulzberger, the path to leadership was present at birth. He is the fourth member of his family to run the Times. After a decade as a reporter, he moved into his first general management job in 1987, as the paper was about to embark on a 10-year plan that included development of a six-section color newspaper and construction of two new printing plants.

Following five years of growth, the company was hit hard by the 1987 stock market crash. But the biggest obstacle to executing the plan was the Times' internal culture, said Sulzberger. "We knew that the Times was often too slow to change, too set in its ways, too hierarchically based," said Sulzberger. "We needed to change all of this, but in a way that preserved our core values." The company hired consultants, including W. Edwards Deming, but by 1992 it became obvious that the Times would need to change from within.

The problems ran deep. "Our newspaper was mired in a silo-based mentality which for years had fostered a culture of mistrust and antagonism," said Sulzberger. For example, the man in circulation responsible every day for sending the production department a memo on how many newspapers to print had never met the man who took the number. Both men had worked at the paper for 20 years and sat two floors away from each other.

Sulzberger set up a series of retreats to confront what he said was a paralyzing, fear-based culture. The first meeting was brutally honest as executives finally dealt with what Sulzberger calls "moose" issues. Moose issues are those that everyone in the organization knows are problems, but are afraid to discuss openly.

A major moose at the Times, he said, is the role of the Sulzberger family in the publicly-held company. (The family controls the company through preferred stock.) At one retreat, Sulzberger recalled, a circulation executive finally piped up and said: "Arthur, this is fine for you; no one's going to fire you. But what's going to happen to the rest of us?"

Sulzberger said he later made that executive, Russell Lewis, chief executive officer of the New York Times Co. and his main partner in driving change, because he had the courage to speak up.

By the time the terrorist attacks occurred in September, Sulzberger said, the company had established enough communication and trust between departments that editor Howell Raines made the decision to throw out nearly every ad in the front section of the Sept. 12 paper without even calling the business side of the organization. "He didn't have to," Sulzberger noted. "We knew what the values were and we agreed. It didn't have to be a conversation."

Sulzberger said the biggest moose facing the Times and all news organizations is what he called "the false dichotomy between quality journalism and quality profits." To address that, executives at the Times agreed on a value system that included the words, "Editorial excellence and independence are essential to our profitability, and profit sustains them."

This year, the New York Times Co.