The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

by William N. Thorndike Jr.

After Sparkman retired in 1995, Malone delegated authority for the company’s cable operations to a new management team led by Brendan Clouston, a former marketing executive. Under Clouston, TCI began to centralize customer service and spend aggressively to upgrade its aging cable facilities. In the third quarter of 1996, however, TCI badly missed its forecast, losing subscribers for the first time in its history and showing a decline in quarterly cash flow. Malone, disappointed by these results, reassumed the helm and, uncharacteristically, took direct management control of operations, quickly reducing employee head count by twenty-five hundred, halting all orders for capital equipment, and aggressively renegotiating programming contracts. He also fired the consultants who had been hired to help with the system upgrade, and returned responsibility for customer service to the local system managers.