Milne: ABC chairman or a CEO-in-chief?

IS the sacking of ABC CEO Michelle Guthrie just an exercise in a board of directors doing its job, or an extraordinary and even inappropriate interference by the board and especially its chairman, Justin Milne, in the CEO doing her job?

And just exactly where does (our proprietor) Rupert Murdoch fit in?

Was she sacked on his instruction? After all, the same cacophony of commentators and critics in the various News Corp media arms who attacked former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull were also mostly attacking Guthrie.

So if they could get a PM sacked by his parliamentary colleagues, surely getting a mere ABC CEO sacked by a chairman and his board would be a doddle.

Although, hang on a minute, the person doing the sacking – ABC chairman Justin Milne – was one of the said PM’s best buddies who in fact had appointed him ABC chairman barely a year ago.

So surely if Murdoch had wanted her sacked for either ideological reasons or for threatening to steal News Corp’s commercial lunch, a Turnbull-mate like Milne would have been aiming at the very opposite? Locking her in for a repeat of her predecessor, Mark Scott’s 10-year reign?

Further complicating it all, Milne didn’t choose but inherited her – she had been appointed by the previous chairman, James Spigelman, who in turn had been appointed chairman by the Gillard Labor government; even though she had worked for Murdoch for 14 years.

So, was she an enemy of the evil empire or a Murdoch mole? Oh dear, conspiracy theories are all

INTERESTINGLY, given their long relationship, there was a strong echo of Turnbull’s justification for ambushing then-PM Tony Abbott in 2015, in Milne’s – for want of a better word – explanation for Guthrie’s sacking.

“We need a different style of leadership,” Turnbull said then; the board believed “that new leadership would benefit the organisation,” Milne said yesterday.

Now clearly when chairman and CEO of any board fall out, it is the CEO who has to and, except in bizarre circumstances, does go. Chairmen sack CEOs, CEOs don’t sack chairmen (although, as we’ve seen in recent times, CEO behaviour can lead to chairmen being sacked).

Stephen Brook at our sister paper The Australian had a very well-timed exclusive yesterday that the duo had fallen out over the ABC’s digital future, and especially a major, major project pushed by Milne.

Further, Brook reported, Milne was more frequently in contact with ABC executives than with Guthrie. This rather suggests that just maybe Guthrie found herself with a “CEO-in-chief” rather than a chairman.

That the Milne who had spent a working lifetime in the digital space just couldn’t let go; that, while he had “inherited his CEO,” he wasn’t prepared to also “inherit” her management or corporate strategy.

In the conventional way these things work, the CEO and her team propose and the board and chairman dispose – either endorsing the proposal or disposing of it and, if necessary, the CEO. That all also happens “in club”, inside the boardroom.

Yet, the way Brook detailed it, Milne was very aggressively, and indeed publicly, selling “his project”.

A particularly telling quote – obviously from the Guthrie camp – was that “they (management) just wanted him to shut up about Jetstream (that project). It is not going to happen”.

It is at least odd to have a chairman taking the public lead on a major corporate project, especially one that neither management nor even presumably the board itself had signed off on.

But then, the ABC and its board are both rather odd.

They don’t have conventional shareholders to whom they are responsible to and they’ve tended to treat the obligations supposedly imposed on them by their legislation as a chooseyour-own smorgasbord.