R ule 1 in business is: Tony Goncalves is probably right
In 2015 I was at NYC Television Week conference listening to Network CEOs telling reporters that OTT was "just a fad," and "no one is going to cut their cable to watch shows on the internet."
In 2025, the production company CEOs can't understand why a population with an average attention span of 2 minutes won't sit through 3 seasons of a show to get to season 4 "where it starts getting good" when Crunchyroll or YouTube or TikTok can itch their niche within 3 clicks. (I groaned writing "itch their niche" but I guarantee someone will say it in a meeting)
But 2025 is also the year that entertainment CEOs decided that if they wait around long enough AI will make all the shows, and they won't need people. Why? Because they ain't got any new tricks in the bag.
Average CEO age has jumped from 46 in 2005 to 54 in 2015 (thanks, Statista). This is important because if you read the "How To Innovation" section of my website (you didn't, I see the stats) you would know that one of the most important metrics of successful innovation is knowing when to GTFO. Leaders who linger too long have no new experiences to draw from. So someone hired in 2005 who hits a hard spot in 2025 is going to do what worked for them 20 years ago--not understanding that the world has moved on.
One might argue that these larger companies are just rearranging deck chairs--either internally or with each other. If you're not careful you end up with the same 20-30 people in the same company-agnostic positions and an industry becomes stale. [cough]
If you look at Tony's timeline you will see a guy who knows WHEN to pivot but is also damn good at picking WHERE to pivot. There is a great Chuck Jones quote about having more experiences makes you more creative that Tony would like and would fit here, but this is obviously a "shaking my fist at clouds" style rant. So, no Chuck Jones quotes.
What we have now is a bad cocktail of 2 parts hubris and 1 part willful ignorance with a chaser of "my kid told me AI can do your job." I dunno how to fix it, but my knee-jerk reaction is that until we can untangle stock-options from C-suite there won't really be an incentive for change. It's like what my mom always told me, "anyone making over $3 million a year, is scamming you--unless their name is Otani."
