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Gerhard Zeiler President Turner Broadcasting System International WS: What was the goal of restructur-
ing Turner Broadcasting System International? ZEILER: It wasn’t only about saving costs. Even more, it is about changing our mindset. We had to challenge our old operating models and our traditional thinking as we built a structure to meet the needs of our current business rather than an organically evolved old structure. In the two regions where we did the restructure, in Europe, Middle East and Africa on one hand and in the Asia-Pacific region on the other hand, we still had a very centralized structure, whereas in pay TV now there is the need to go local. There is the English word “devolution”: when the king gave more power to Scotland and to Wales, that was the process of devolution. And that is what I would like to compare our restructure to—we gave more power, more responsibility and more accountability to the local management, whether it was the U.K., Germany, Spain and Italy, or Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, India and Japan. That is a change in mindset, almost a cultural change in the organization. WS: What opportunities are there for Turner Broadcasting
to work with its sister companies? ZEILER: When you look at Time Warner today and you
compare it to five years ago, there is a huge difference. Today there are only four divisions: HBO, Warner Bros., Turner and Time Inc. and in the not so distant future it will be only HBO, Warner Bros. and Turner. So it is only natural that we cooperate much more closely. We really care about each other, about each other’s successes. Jeffrey Schlesinger [president of Warner Bros. Worldwide Television Distribution], Simon Sutton [president of HBO International and Content Distribution] and I are talking regularly [about] how we can work together in a way that helps the whole of Time Warner. 18