At Playboy Enterprises the title CEO might as well stand for "chief exposed officer." According to company lore, Christie Hefner, Playboy's 48-year-old head honcho, never lowers the silver blinds in her glass-walled office, giving employees a voyeur's-eye view of the boss hard at work.
Since joining her father's company in 1975 as an executive assistant, Hefner has earned a reputation as a diligent executive with a passion for numbers. She assumed control of the company in 1988, at a time when Playboy was losing money faster than her father now pops Viagra. Hefner moved decisively to protect Playboy's invaluable brand, extracting the company from questionable ventures-the limousine business, for one-and jettisoning ill-advised products, like Playboy air fresheners.
As the business expanded its lucrative cable television operations and launched a popular Web site, Playboy's stock rose. The company seemed destined to meet Hefner's oft-stated goal of a $1 billion market capitalization (Playboy's current market cap: $359 million). Of late, however, the economy has battered media companies, including Playboy, which lost more than $12 million in the first half of this year alone. Still, Hefner was poised during a recent interview in her Chicago office-as a handful of her employees undoubtedly looked on.
Why do you have an open office?
When we moved here about 11 years ago, this was raw space. Not surprisingly, every architectural firm that submitted designs suggested putting my office in the corner, overlooking the lake. And I said to every one of them, "No, you don't get it." The idea here is to have an open work plan, to integrate people rather than isolate them.
Where do you do your best thinking?
There's no one place. One discipline I've learned is to have patience when I'm working through a challenging issue, whether it's a problem or an opportunity, and let the ideas come to me. If I'm not sure I have a good idea, I'll sit with the document, I'll hold on to the e-mail, I'll say, "Let's talk about that again tomorrow." I find that when I'm in different situations, interacting with different people-even if I'm not discussing that particular issue-something may prompt me to have the insight I was looking for.
You once said, "I can't see that my being a woman influences my strategic thinking." Do you really believe men and women approach business in the same way?
You can't say that men are one way and women another. Women approach business in a range of ways. The difference between one woman's approach and another's can be greater than the difference between the average woman's and the average man's. Are you autocratic or collaborative? Dictatorial or nurturing? I can show you as many autocratic, dictatorial women leaders as collaborative and nurturing men. So my conclusion is that those are human qualities that may exist to a greater extent in one gender or the other. But what's important to me is that if you want to be an effective leader, you need to have an arsenal of styles and skills. There are times when being very nurturing and patient, even at the risk of being considered soft, is critical. And there are times when being very demanding and tough, at the risk of being seen as a dictator, is critical. And if you can't run that gamut, depending on the situation and the people you're interacting with, you won't be as effective.
Obviously, we hear a lot about your father. But what business lessons did you learn from your mother?
How to treat people. The difference between studying business in school and being in the business world comes down to people. Everything you do-whether it's problem solving or developing growth strategies-involves working effectively with people: finding the right people, motivating the right people, having people work effectively once they're on board. And my mother has extraordinary people skills. She actually used to work in the HR department here and to this day is missed more than anybody who ever worked in this company. More than anything else, the set of people skills I have I owe to her.
Playboy puts prospective employees through psychological testing. What's the rationale behind that?
To clarify, we don't do this for all employees, because that would be too cumbersome and expensive. But we have done it here for more than 15 years for senior positions, whether it's a recruitment or an internal promotion.
Why did you start?
When I became president, we were using a management psychology firm. I didn't know much about it, so I put myself through the process. I was singularly unimpressed, and we parted company with the firm. So I actually started my career with a bias against the process. Some years passed, and I began hearing about a Chicago-based firm from different friends in the business community. The third time I heard the name-well, it was like the third time somebody tells you they've had a great Italian meal someplace and you say, "I've got to go try that." I met the principal and again went through the process. It was much more of an interview than the first one, and I was very impressed by the insights he had about me.
So what did you learn?
That the farther up the management chain you go, the more ego you need to be successful. And ego doesn't necessarily mean bad, as in "That person has so much ego, all he sees is himself. He doesn't listen to other people." One of the most important balances is having enough confidence to carry the weight of the decision making, and communicating that confidence while at the same time not being arrogant or having the kind of hubris that makes you blind.
How much ego did it take to assume control at 35, as the daughter of the founder, and manage subordinates who were significantly older?
Remember, when I took over the company, I'd been here for seven years. I wasn't a stranger. I didn't parachute in. Some people were able to adjust to having a boss who was younger and a woman and the daughter of the founder. Those were successful relationships. Some people were not able to adjust, and in those cases I worked very hard, and I think successfully, to part with them amicably. The vast majority of people were perfectly willing to take a wait-and-see attitude.
What three qualities should every executive have?
Passion: because I don't think you can fake it. Confidence: You have to have confidence in your judgment and the ability to make decisions. And communication skills: the ability to communicate with people in the company and with potential partners and customers, to articulate the vision in a way that motivates and empowers people. I can't think of anybody here who is successful who doesn't have that. For me personally, processing and analyzing a lot of information is critical. The breadth of what I do is significant because of the portfolio of businesses we're in, so being able to juggle a lot of things and process a lot of information is invaluable.
You've been quoted as saying, "It would be easy to get trapped into moving 100 things forward an inch instead of 10 things forward a mile." How do you keep yourself and Playboy focused?
It's hard. Every few years, maybe every five years, we go to an outside company and say, "Take a look at us. Here is our goal right now." We're currently working toward our goal of a billion-dollar market cap. So two years ago we hired Booz-Allen & Hamilton to look at our business strategies against our financial goals and tell us whether they thought we were trying to do too much, or doing things we shouldn't be doing, or missing opportunities.
Which of your initiatives has succeeded beyond your wildest dreams?
Television. This is a business that, on comparable sales to publishing, makes nearly four times the money. And [at Playboy] television is still nascent in its life cycle. We're only in 20 percent of the cable homes in the U.S., since most U.S. systems are still old analog systems with limited channel capacity. But our potential subscriber growth rate in the U.S. is a multiple of five. Outside the U.S., there's still a huge opportunity in terms of television homes that aren't yet receiving satellite- or cable-delivered services. So I thought the company's opportunities were greater in extending the brand into television than extending our expertise into other magazines. There are really only two businesses that, strategically, I've been responsible for taking us into: television and online. Online, I believe, will be at least as successful as television. And I'm proud of what we didn't go into. We didn't go into theme restaurants, which was a very hot business a few years ago and which was pitched to us a lot. Sometimes I think that executives don't get enough credit for the things they don't do, which can be more important than the things they do.
You may be one of the most powerful women in publishing today. What did you learn from the late Katharine Graham?
I've talked about the balance between humility and confidence, and I think you see that in how she led. Here was a woman who, in her book, revealed her insecurities in intimate detail, and yet, on the big stuff, at critical points in the newspaper's history where lesser people would have folded-the lawyers tell you to fold, the banking people tell you to fold, and nobody would ever blame you for folding-she didn't fold.
Any words of advice you can offer to a woman who's just received her MBA?
Decide whether you want to be a trailblazer or not. If you don't, then I would urge you to be cautious about going into a situation where women aren't already in positions of power. Because no matter what they say when they're recruiting you, if they haven't already walked the walk, you're going to pay a price for being the trailblazer. Now, I think it's really important that there are trailblazers-otherwise the world doesn't change. But not everybody wants to be the first, the only, the minority. You also have to decide whether you want to look only at organizations that already have a critical mass of women with decision-making powers. You know, 40 percent of my executives are women. So when I hire the next woman, she's not "the woman" on the management team, she's just Susan.
Are you troubled by the increasing number of corporations that monitor their employees?
I'm not a big fan of it. At the end of the day, your best protection as an employer is to hire good people and create a work environment where they feel that they're respected. The more you send the signal that you don't trust people, the more likely there will be a reason not to trust people.
So do you allow employees to look at Internet porn?
We have a kind of "trust our people" philosophy, so we don't monitor them online or on the phone. In our business, we have people who ought to be looking at adult sites for competitive reasons, but that's a whole other thing. The online pornography issue is complicated because companies have gone beyond what, in my opinion, makes any sense in their worry about sexual harassment laws.
Your father's lifestyle remains an important component of the Playboy brand. Is it a challenge to modernize your brand and keep it fresh when your father, who's quite old now, still makes news?
If Hef were sitting here, he'd say that the excitement around parties at the mansion, when he goes out to a club or film event, and his lifestyle, which has been reinvigorated since the years when he was married, monogamous, and living with his family, has exceeded his expectations. Even though he's in his 70s, there doesn't seem to be a more popular, hipper guy out there today.
Is there a silk robe with your initials on it?
No, I don't think I'm working my way into pajamas and slippers as I pass my next birthday.
In 1981, when you were 29 years old, Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program rejected your application on the grounds that you were too young. Any message for them now?
Well, when I talked to the person on the phone many years ago, I did say that if they didn't take me, one of two things would happen: Either I'd wind up running the company and I would fail (while if I'd had the benefit of the program, I might have succeeded, and that would be too bad), or I would wind up taking over the company and I'd succeed, and then they would have lost the opportunity to play a part in that, and they'd wind up inviting me back to lecture. Of course, the latter is what happened.
But do you have anything to say to them now?
I like to think that in this day and age they wouldn't be as age sensitive as they were, that they'd take the next 29-year-old woman who will be running a company within a few years. And I'd guess that would be true just because of what's happened with the Internet. It would be such a competitive disadvantage against other programs if they kept that same age bias in a world in which people far younger than I was have been running big companies.
Have you learned anything in the bedroom that you've used in the boardroom?
Oh, goodness! Here's something, but it would be fairer to say this is a skill useful in the bedroom and the boardroom: It's less what you say and more what the other person understands you to have said that's important. Too often, whether in the bedroom or the boardroom, a person might think they're communicating because they feel they've expressed their feelings or point of view. But that's irrelevant. What's relevant is whether you understand what I've said about my feelings and my point of view. That requires much more active communication skills than just speaking. It requires drawing people out in a way that tells you whether they've understood. If you can do that, you're a better lover and a better leader.
