Stanford Business School Honors Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes with Excellence in Leadership Award
NEW YORK—The Stanford Graduate School of Business honored Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes, who has played a pivotal role in reshaping the entertainment industry, with the School’s 2009 Excellence in Leadership Award.
Bewkes, 56, who earned an MBA at the School in 1977, received the leadership award at an April 14 event at the Rainbow Room in New York.
Each year, the Business School marks the importance of leadership in management by recognizing a graduate who has made significant contributions to the corporate world and the community.
“This award spotlights achievements of alumni who have exhibited the leadership and integrity that we hope all our students demonstrate throughout their careers,” said Robert L. Joss, the Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Jeff aspired early to be part of the entertainment industry. His passion for the field has taken him into management roles through which he is innovating the future of content distribution in a rapidly changing industry.”
Bewkes planned to be a television reporter when he graduated from college, and one of his first jobs was at NBC, where he worked as a researcher. He left to work briefly at Citibank before joining HBO, a unit of Time Warner, as a junior finance executive in 1979, when only 10 percent of the country had cable TV. In a speech on leadership at the Business School in 2004, he recalled that he had just wanted to get his foot in the door of the fledgling cable network. What attracted him enough to take a significant cut in pay was that HBO was on a mission to invent a new kind of television. “You know what HBO is now,” he said in 2004, “but you have to remember that back then, we didn't know. We had to make it up.”
Bewkes fed his penchant for creating something new as he worked his way up the ranks to become CEO at HBO in 1995. He focused on creating original content and programming, including hits such as Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. In 2005, he was named chief operating officer of Time Warner.
Since rising to CEO of Time Warner in January 2008, Bewkes has had to cope with continuing fallout from an earlier Time Warner-AOL merger. He has restructured the company to focus on content and to develop the company’s major programming brands including TNT, HBO, CNN, TBS, Warner Brothers, Time, People, and Sports Illustrated.
Under his leadership, Time Warner is evolving from what was once a company of cable distribution systems to a primarily content-driven company. Bewkes’ vision has been to deliver original Time Warner brand content via several distribution systems, such as online, mobile, television, and cinema as well as cable. As COO, Bewkes also had overseen the sale of Time Warner's music subsidiary and the company's book publishing unit.
Bewkes is a trustee of Yale University and a member of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council. He is a member of the boards of the American Museum of Natural History, the Creative Coalition, and the Paley Center for Media. He earned his BA at Yale.