You can’t avoid it. In fact, you have to surface conflict continuously, before tensions mount too high. Tension is the price of admission when you are innovating. I should have confronted Jeff Zucker long before and told him that his actions were unacceptable. And I should have stated my position up front—I was in charge of the NBC Agency. I didn’t need his permission to run the agency. I had backed down to preserve the peace, but as I was coming to realize, appeasement is the antithesis of innovation.
