CTAM Summit 2009: The Cable Center: Leaner, But Flourishing
Q&A With The Cable Center's CEO Larry Satkowiak
by KC Neel -- Multichannel News, 10/24/2009 8:05:13 PM
Denver — Click here for more coverage of CTAM Summit 2009
MCN: The Cable Center is a very different place today than it was 25 years ago when it was initially conceived. It's different than it was eight years ago when the building you're in today was built. And it's even different from three years ago when you last did your strategic planning. How has the Center morphed over time?
Larry Satkowiak
LS: Four and a
half years ago, we did an industry survey and asked people to tell us what's
right with The Cable Center and what's wrong. After that, our board said: There
are two things that you need to do. One is, you've got to be relevant to the
cable industry. Your mission has to be relevant, your programs have to be
relevant, there has to be value in there. The second is more the financial sort
of a deal: You guys are out in Denver,
you have a big building, what are you doing with the money that we have already
given you?
We trimmed down in size and trimmed down in programs. Instead of doing 21 programs, now we're doing basically four programs. We concentrated on doing those four programs very well, delivering a value that we believe the cable industry could get behind, programs like the Cable Mavericks [lecture series], that have been very well received.
With the environment in the cable industry being the way it is, the economic environment certainly being the way it is, our board has prepared us for this.
MCN: Would you consider academia one of your constituencies?
LS: It's [a] central focus of our mission statement. We have broken our mission statement down into, really, three different components. The first one is to preserve and celebrate cable's enduring contributions to society. The second is building a bridge between the cable industry and higher education. And the third is the customer experience aspect of what we do.
We take cable executives in our Cable Mavericks program and put them on college campuses. It's been a very popular program, it's been a very effective program, because it's not us talking to the students. It's people that are really in the trenches that are trying to work with the business, a very complex business with regulations changing and business changing and technology driving change and the competitive nature of our business.
Students love to hear our people go on college campuses, cable people going on campuses and talking about what [it's] like to be in that kind of environment. Students inevitably come away with a vision of cable that they never had.
They really think, a lot of them, that cable is that thing that I just plug into the wall and they just really take it for granted and they don't think about what goes behind it. There are a lot of things happening in the cable industry that are very interesting to college students, and we want them to consider a career in cable. We've been at 28 universities at this point across the United States.
We did a chair in customer experience management at the University of Denver. We hired a professor. The money is solid, it's behind us. And so we've grown that money over time.
MCN: That's the only MBA program in customer care in the nation, as I understand it.
LS: It is, as far as I know. I haven't heard of another one with the customer [actually] being the central focus.
[Former Cox Communications CEO] Jim Robbins, after working on it for so many years, spoke to the first CEM class that we had here at The Cable Center. We were up in the Distance Learning studio; that was about a year before he passed away. The words that he told the students at that time were that technology brings us all to parity at one point or another. The only thing that's going to differentiate one business from another is the quality of experience that a customer has with our company, and we think that is our competitive advantage.
If you talk to folks at Cox and other companies, obviously, today you can see that same feeling going on. Technologies change, people change, but the culture that comes around, that focus on the customer doesn't.
MCN: The other big program you guys have is the Hall of Fame. The induction ceremony is on Oct. 27. That is one piece of The Cable Center that tends to look back.
LS: We're going through our 12th Hall of Fame at this point. I think there have been 71 people inducted, and seven more this year would make 78.
A lot of people will say, "Well, why do we have a Hall of Fame?" Some people think the industry is too new to actually think back historically. But if you think about the pace of change in the cable industry, we're right now living history. Look at the way marketing has progressed here just in the last 10 or 20 years.
There's no other place, really, where people can get recognized for the innovation, for the creativity, for the forethought, for [taking] a risk and put[ting] their own capital on the line; some of them almost went out of business. People don't realize how close some of these people really were to going out of business and then somebody stepped in and gave them a hand.
The oral history program that we have is still one of the most popular things on our Web site. We have just over 300 oral histories at this point - people are downloading these things not only during the Hall of Fame, but we know that a lot of students are taking a look at these things, too.
The people that have done the oral histories are more than willing to say, "Well, it hasn't been a bed of roses. There were times where I had to go out and take care of that cable system in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve because, even though my wife wanted me there for dinner, I've got to go out there and make the thing work."
You get all these kinds of stories of people who started off in the industry climbing poles and now they're running cable businesses, people that started from the bottom and worked up.
Something else that we do: We have a Cable Cares collection here at The Cable Center. Recent stuff with Cable Positive, we're recording what they have done. Those are the boxes out over there, by the way, in the library. We don't want to forget that, because they were very successful in accomplishing the things that they set out to accomplish when they first came up with Cable Positive, and I think it's a very good statement about the cable industry.
MCN: Where do you want and where do you envision The Cable Center going forward?
LS: I think The Cable Center will continue to change according to the needs of the industry. Taking a look at cable's contributions to society - we're always going to do that.
As far as building bridges between us and higher education, I definitely see us doing that but I see us doing more. I actually see us somewhere in the future maybe having communities of colleges and cable companies working together on particular issues or problems or recruitment or internships or these sorts of things.
I see us sometimes with that as even having more of an international focus on things. I would love to do something in Europe, for instance, or something in China.
We've had a little bit of a flavor of that as we do different things with the Anna and John Sie Foundation, with our Chinese Executive Media Management Program. The University of Denver is where they go, but we greet the students over here, we're part of that cable history.
When we do training, we don't have to send people to The Cable Center; we can send people out to you. If you still don't want to do that, now we're taking a look at the technology to actually do online and distance learning education directly to the person, not only on their home computer but also on their BlackBerry or their iPhone or whatever.
We're looking at ways that we can improve the experience with The Cable Center in a way that the industry would like, which is high-quality types of content at a very good price.Honoring the Past, Looking Ahead
10/12/2008Honoring the Past, Looking Ahead
10/24/2009Cable Center Tests Distance Learning
05/26/2002
