It seems it may take more than one hand to start and name all the top Cablevision employees that are "retiring" these days. Late last year came CEO Tom Rutledge and his right hand man John Bickham. Recently EVP of marketing, Jonathan Hargis and now EVPs of engineering and operations, Jim Blackly and Kathleen Mayo. And just to add more fuel to the firing, from their spinoff of MSG comes the Knicks Coach Mike D'Antoni. Watching the leadership of the ship all jumping overboard, one has to ask is Cablevision about to sink? What is causing this mass exodus?
Is it because they are all good soldiers, they are retreating with their captain,Tom Rutledge, away from the battle or is it that they don't believe they can prosper under the re-emergence of Jim Dolan to the day to day operations? It surely can't be because they know that Cablevision may soon be for sale. Why leave a possible financial package on the table? There must be more and my guess is that it is directly based on current leadership.
In any business, the leader sets the agenda, the tone, the culture. As much as employees try to influence cultural change from the bottom up; ultimately, top down sets the course. And based on that knowledge, I suspect that the heavy hand of Jim Dolan back into operations, replacing the style and approach of Tom Rutledge, is the cause for the exodus. Are these resignations or firings; we may not know for sure. I wouldn't be surprised to eventually here that there may have been a little push. For now leadership change is in the air at Cablevision and more resignations are likely to follow.
The stock market has its own opinion of Cablevision - the share price is down more than 40 percent since AMC was spun off last summer.
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