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Notable New     Yorkers
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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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neutral, we would have been alright. We'd have still had to have the money. But if a development like that is going to go, you've got to have total commitment or hands off. I didn't have hands off, and I certainly didn't have any commitment. I thought we were a pretty bright company. We had some terrific men and women in that company. They are not there today. We had strong leaders in almost every part of the company. For example -- this was not my idea -- Paul Kesten said to me one day, “Do you think the organization is as good as it can be?” Now, we only had one real competitor and that was NBC. Mutual wasn't much of a competitor and there was no ABC. Our competitor was NBC. I said, “Why don't we find out in the marketplace what people think about us?” I wouldn't do this today. I guess my standards are a little different than they were then. But I wanted to find out just what the world thought of us. There was a lot of talk in those days of somebody starting a third network. I hired an outside management consulting group and said, “We want you to go to the advertising agencies up and down Madison Avenue, to a lot of the big advertisers, to a lot of the big station owners, and say, We have a group -- well-financed --

Q:

Yes, I think you actually mentioned this before.

Stanton:

Did I? That's what we did. We knew, for example, when Young and Rubicom said, “If you want the best sales manager, there's a guy at CBS that you've got to hire.” That made us feel very good, because that was the best test we had. Anyway we could have made the receiver thing work. You see, television was just sticking its head up. If we had come out with a good product, properly promoted, there's no reason we couldn't have sold -- in a couple of years -- shoulder to shoulder with RCA. If we hadn't demonstrated it in the records side, I wouldn't be so cocky about it on the television side. But we had good engineering people. That was a difference in philosophy. By that time, he was interested in the diversification in





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