About this episode
The meeting that Chuck Fisher brings to our attention began not unlike hundreds, if not thousands, of other meetings that he has sat in on during his 25-year business career. However, it was at one particular gathering that he witnessed the thinking that would trigger one of the last decade’s greatest strategic bets. Back in 2013, Fisher had only recently joined the business development team at Charter Communications when he found himself in a meeting that included Charter’s then-CEO, Tom Rutledge. The meeting had begun, like many others, with Rutledge highlighting a number of Charter’s recent “wins”—before his message became far more nuanced. Fisher recalls Rutledge saying, “The thing that we need to understand as a company is that we can be the best operators in the business—which I think that we are—but as long as we’re subscale, we’re always going to be playing the game by someone else’s rules and we will never have a seat at the table to define the direction of the industry.” It was later in that day—or perhaps a day or two later—when the Charter M&A team began to contemplate the acquisition of Time Warner Cable, a company roughly four times its size. “It was audacious to think of Charter as the acquirer, inasmuch as every logical design as far as how industries evolve goes would have had Time Warner acquiring us,” explains Fisher, who adds that the Time Warner deal ultimately took 3 years for Charter to complete. Along the way, Fisher reports, there were plenty of headline-grabbing twists and turns, but the organization stayed focused. “We believed that we were the better operators and had a better strategy,” remarks Fisher, who turns our attention back to the early meeting with Rutledge, when the CEO made Fisher and others realize that Charter’s operations edge wouldn’t matter unless the company did something bold to “move the needle.” “Our one big question became, ‘How do we fix things?,’” continues Fisher, who observes that Rutledge’s insights brought clarity to the transformative role that a deal the size of the one involving Time Warner Cable could play in the company’s future. Says Fisher: “Those comments became the guiding principles for us as an organization.” - Jack Sweeney