One of the Toughest Jobs in America

Mary Berner is the CEO of Cumulus. She isn't responsible for the mess it was when she took over two years ago, but I suspect even she didn't understand just how messy it was. Today's Tom Taylor column offers her assessment after two years on the job...

CEO Mary Berner explains “How we fixed our toxic culture” at Cumulus. That’s the title of Berner’s self-penned column for the “Chief Executive” site. Magazine-industry pro Berner is now two years into her first radio management gig, and from the beginning she mentioned changing the culture as one of her four major concerns. She writes that “It was clear that Cumulus would not be saved by any of the traditional turnaround quick fixes” like slashing costs. There was (and is) too much debt for a “transformational M&A” deal. She needed the staff to understand her priorities and to buy into them, and now she writes that “our culture has made a 180-degree turn,” resulting in (for example) much lower turnover. By the way – she admits that Cumulus is “still a resource-starved, over-leveraged company operating in a difficult market.”

Sounds like a pretty reasonable approach to me, and you know I'm not one to cut a lot of slack to radio company CEOs.