Name: Altice Leadership Playbook: Bold Moves, Entrepreneurial Spirit, Diverse Thinking
Uploaded: 2019-10-17
Duration: 5 min 56 s
Description: CEO Dexter Goei transforms the cable TV provider propelling it onto the Fortune 500 for the first time ever.

[ MUSIC ] Dexter, let's talk about the day that Altice bought Cable Vision from the Dolan family and changed the company's name to Altice. How would you describe that first day for you and the reaction from Cable Vision employees? From a foreign country to come in and buy such an iconic brand in the New York tri state area, which is the number one DMA in the US, my colleagues and myself were very emotional that day because it was a big coming out of us having spent most of our time in Europe. And what was the reaction from From employees who had been working for decades for Cablevision. I think they were anxious, there was a lot of nervousness, a lot of anxiety. When New Yorkers talk about Cablevision, they talk about the powerful Charles Dolan, who built this into a huge company. And he had a very bureaucratic command- and- control management style What did you say? And what did you do to telegraph to all your employees that I'm a different guy and this is a different company. It's critical to establish the management team in the first couple of weeks and even before closing, we spend a lot of time just interviewing people. Do you want to be here if you do not want to be here. We wanna give a very good servants package. But if you don't wanna be here, I'm not gonna try and keep you here. How did that go over? A lot of people raised their hands and said, " Thank you very much, I appreciate and hence servants package, I'm just gonna go somewhere else. There was a culture of meetings, committees bind us all the time. Which goes back to some of the way things were organized before. We broke all that down. How did you get that across? [ LAUGH ] I bend all binders to start, number one. I just said no more white binders, I don't wanna see any more white binders and, by the way, I don't want too many meetings. What was the reaction? I think people were like wow. I'm allowed to speak to him before Before speaking to you. I'm like absolutely. I don't wanna speak with either of you. You guys figure it out yourselves. So as a period of getting used to that working. But I think it caught on very quickly. I heard there was a lot of suprise when you went to the cafeteria. Absolutely Because the Doolen's. We're never seeing in that [ INAUDIBLE ] There used to be catering up in the executive suit and I am like, by the way, I don't like those warmers with food in them and by the way you eat too much anyways. So why don't we just go to the cafeteria and people are looking at me and it's like, is that him? And then get this feedback from people around me saying, you want cafeteria, and I was like Yeah, I've been going the cafeteria my whole life. You know, this is normal. I don't really care if I'm CEO or financial level person. People can call me all the time. Do they? Yeah, absolutely. Do you respond? I respond personally. Absolutely all the time. So I'm told that you're very involved as a CEO that you listen on calls with customers. You often get in on the trucks with the installers go out with the crews. Why do you do that and what do you hope to get out of it? I went down to New York. I've been down the Bronx, I'm doing installs and very, very low income areas. But what was funny is people thought I was like an intern. I was dressed like this, I'd have a hard hat on they're like, what are you doing here cuz I was just sitting there watching. We spend a lot of our time not just on listening to the problems, how do we get the connectivity better. You come back, you have all this information And then what do you do with it? I send an email to about four or five top operational people on my team and say these are the things I have learned. I try to do it once a quarter and go out regularly. You have a very unusual background. Your mother and father are both Chineese. You grew up in Paris. You came to US for college. You went to Georgetown. How has this multicultural background of yours influenced the way you lead the company? If you grew up in one spot with the same information, Florence's is everyone in your neighbourhood. You think like that neighbourhood does. The makeup of my family's very international My wife is Italian Argentine. So we have exposures to everything across every single geography many different languages. Both in my personal and professional experience. And that just allows you to listen. So many CEOs talk about creating a diverse workplace. What's your take on them. When you think about what you're touching upon and what you're effecting every day. You need to be able to react to someone in California from an Hispanic descent to someone in the Bronx or an African American descent. If you're not diverse in the people that are managing making those decisions, how are you supposed to be able to cater to your customers? CEOs genuinely want to have a diverse workplace and a diverse board. They do believe it. But the struggle with it, it's not easy for them to do it. What does it takes to pull that off? But if you're not recruiting diversity and you're not promoting diversity, you're never gonna get the right decision makers in the place. So I spend all my time on diversity, thinking about those elements, saying guys Who are you recruiting and why? I know you wanna recruit someone who looks and talks like you, but have you thought about recruiting differently? So you're challenging the norms a little bit and trying to break down the barriers and if you do that, once The person listens. Is there anyone along the way in your very successful career who gave you some great leadership advice that stuck with you through all these years and shaped you? People get paralysed through analysis, and if you analyse too much, you absolutely make the wrong decisions. If you don't analyse at all, you probably make the wrong decisions, as well. My mother said to me all the time, It's not that big of a deal. If it's not that big of a deal, you can make mistakes. You can go quicker. You don't have to sit back and analyze every single aspect of an equation or problem before trying to make a decision. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Altice Leadership Playbook: Bold Moves, Entrepreneurial Spirit, Diverse Thinking

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CEO Dexter Goei transforms the cable TV provider propelling it onto the Fortune 500 for the first time ever.