Jeffrey Bewkes, president of Time Warner, told his Sports Illustrated magazine division to go take a flying leap when they wanted to partner with AOL's sports channel to build a giant sports web site. Synergies, he told the Wall Street Journal, are bullshit.
As someone who made part of her career not just believing in synergies but putting solid numerical values to them and offering them up, like holy sacraments of PowerPoint, to the strategists at gigantic corporations: this is a hard pill to swallow. And though I see it not working more often than not, I also see so many areas -- yes, within Time Warner, where I work today -- where it does work. Heck, everyday I make my bucks on the back of the synergy.
But instead of calling them "synergies," now, Time Warner is calling them "adjacencies." Sumner Redstone split up Viacom and CBS because the "clout" he was supposed to get from his company's huge size "got us nowhere." Is the day of the synergy over and done with?
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