Bob Magness
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"• To accomplish these goals, I sketched out a second list: • Retire from TCI. • Reduce outside public board memberships from 11 to 4. • Remain chairman and controlling shareholder in Liberty. • Remain chairman of CableLabs. • Stay on the Turner board. • Get the government off TCI’s back. • Generate predictable income by deferring TCI compensation payments with stock dividends, which should produce sufficient cash to maintain our lifestyle. • Say nothing publicly about the contemplated change until Bob Magness is comfortable."
"So, I turned down Steve Ross’s offer of $150,000 a year and lots of perks, and Irving’s offer to run the largest cable operator in the U.S., to join Bob Magness, a down-on-his-luck cable operator whose company was running fast but deep in debt. Starting pay: $60,000 a year. I look back on that decision, and I smile at how naive I was at the time. You are unafraid of what you don’t know."
"In this and all other issues, my aging cowboy boss, Bob Magness, was glad to hand the reins over to me. He had borrowed big-time to buy or build more than two hundred cable systems in twenty-one states, with all the headaches of running them. Those headaches were all mine now—meeting with seven banks to get credit for TCI, five banks for a subsidiary called NTA, and two banks for a cable company called Athena, which Magness had bought from Gulf+Western a few years earlier."
"I never responded to it. We were discussing the price of MTV, not the end of the planet. Bob Magness said it best: you cannot win a pissing contest with a skunk, so there’s no point in defending yourself or saying anything."
"Larry Romrell, a lean and quiet mustachioed engineer from Idaho, maintained the company’s microwave transmitters and headends. Having teamed up with Bob Magness almost from the start, Larry was a strategic thinker, and he was tough as nails. He carried a gun to shoot rattlesnakes or cougars as he hiked five miles or more up the side of a mountain to make repairs on headends, where, in the winter months, Larry’s crew stored venison in the headend sheds on some mountains in case they were hemmed in by snowstorms. Larry is also a great listener—and more than fifty years later, he remains my best friend."