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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

Q:

What about the larger, the general direction of the corporation, as opposed to HBO?

Heiskell:

Well, what they can do is--most businessmen are trained to look at return on capital, return on equity--those formulae, the “MBA approach” to things. If you're in the business of inventing, there is no way of saying “return on equity.” ATC started as a--ATC we bought, sold, bought and sold before we finally bought it. And I don't think there's a director who could follow what we were doing, and I'm not sure that we knew ourselves what we were doing, but at least we did it, and finally we did it with conviction, and finally, you know--here it is, a great big thing. But the board--can the board--I think I told you about when I brought People to the board. I said, “There is no way I could tell you what it's going to do, make”--so on and so on. Very difficult for a board to judge the one thing they can do is hire and fire a CEO. That they can. They can look at the overall finances of the company and say, “You've got too much debt,” or, “you haven't got enough debt.” They can do those kinds of things, but they can't--they can make more sense about a papermill in East Texas than they can about a magazine, HBO, or what have you. I mean, the papermill in East Texas is something they could understand.

Q:

Well, as the years went by, what was the function--did the board have a function at Time Inc.?

Heiskell:

Yes. It has one really good function. It makes you every





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