O'Brien to replace Leno

O'Brien is to take over the helm of the Tonight Show from Jay Leno, in 2009! Welcome all you new MIT freshmen with your 2008 t-shirts. By the time you graduate, Leno would still be hosting the show. Feel better now?anyway, here are a couple of links to this story.

here

or here

The articles were supposedly written by different people. If news was academia, they would be expelled. Both stories are the same story, verbatim (at least significant parts of them). Wonder how that goes.We can look at TV networks as trying to have competitive advantages over each other, with assets (or resources) being people like O'Brien and Leno. Trying to keep those assets means paying them lots of money, as well as binding them contractually for long periods of time. In this case however, they are trying to keep their asset with a promise (backed by the huge penalty for breaking this promise which is in the contract) of something this asset really really wants. As this asset is valuable, rare and hard to imitate, it would provide the network with sustained competitive advantage (maybe). So far, that's pretty Barney. However, looking at it in a Porter way, O'Brien may be a costumer for the network, as well as a supplier of services (is it a two way relationship, depending on how you look at it?). There is threat of substitution, meaning he can go for what he needs (airtime, salary, ego boosting, perks and whatnot) somewhere else, with a switching cost that might be paid by his new employer. After all, he might be worth it. If the switching costs are low, try to raise them! Which they did. Now he'd be losing the Tonight Show. Cool. On a different note, publishing these plans reduces the chance of O'Brien being approached by another network. In a more general sense, keeping secrets costs you money and puts you at risk of these secrets being exposed when the timing is not right for you. It is very wise not to keep secrets unless you have to. That's true on any level, but is the subject of a different discussion altogether