Looking into a crystal ball, as we hurtle toward the new millennium, one does not have to sport several Ph.D.s to fully grasp the concept that the cable industry is perfectly positioned for the high-speed, broadband, mega-channel distribution future that the world is demanding.
     Whether it is up to the challenge of embracing victory will be at least one question worth waiting to see answered come the much-heralded advent of the year-2000 problem.
     Why shouldn’t cable surge ahead? Cable has the leading edge in critical areas: resolving key technology issues, establishing programming alliances and commanding unfettered access to the home.
     Cable has an immense number of existing connections. It can mine the data derived from them and specifically target market multiple viable revenue-producing products to existing and potential customers.
     Operators are integrating horizontally with each other and vertically with Internet-content providers, telephone companies, e-commerce providers and magazine, newspaper and book publishers to further expand their number of income-generating outlets.
     Mergers (AT&T Corp.-Tele –Communications Inc.), consolidations, restructuring for geographical/technological efficiencies (TCI-Falcon Cable TV Corp.) and joint ventures (MediaOne Group Inc.’s and Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner) have become the order of the day.
     Operators have committed themselves to meeting customer needs and maintaining their loyalty in the electronic-information revolution that has them pitted against other competing forces, like the new American Online Inc./Netscape Communications Corp. alliance.
     Everybody is cueing up for "Convergence Day," when you turn on your wall-wide TV screen as your best friend calls you with a video of his hole-in-one, you hit your remote for that movie that your spouse has been nagging you to see and your bills are paid on-screen, just in time, before your oldest son e-mails you from his college dorm for more money.
     That’s the promise of convergence. The actual working delivery of it is the dream of cable (and everyone else in the race), and here are some reasons why cable is getting all dressed up and ready to deliver its acceptance speech:

• Cable has the content and to paraphrase Food Network’s Emeril Legasse, "Content rules."
• Cable has the ability to provide world-class bandwidth and scorchingly high-speed Internet access.
• Cable, arm-twisted by competition, has been forced to embrace and drive new technological delivery systems, and it has a history of successfully and efficiently marketing them to a huge national subscriber base.
• Cable understands how to attract valued-added business. Even when the technology was admittedly Jurassic, cable managed to piece together enough of a pay-per-view marketing effort to create a consumer appetite that has been exploited by the satellite services with their more frequent offerings.
• Cable speaks convergence. From data to phone lines to entertainment, it is easier to imagine one connection to your local cable company than laboriously calling a host of other providers to accomplish the same thing.

     While cable is clearly positioned for triumph, it is imperative that the team not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It is crucial for MSOs, local system operators and cable-network service providers to pick the right executive team to steer the ship toward the horizon.
     Since content, distribution, technology and marketing are sailing in the right direction, the question is: What sort of executive team should you field?
     Before answering that question, we need to take a look at and begin to understand the talent market that currently exists. Today’s executive suites are filled by a variety of personality types. Significant among them are certain categories that can be characterized as follows:

• Hyper-futurists (far-future-oriented);
• Futurists (foreseeable-future-oriented);
• Realists (present-oriented);
• Future-resistants (recent-past-orientated); and
• Reactionaries (distant-past-oriented).

     The best way to describe these personalities is to imagine all of them visiting the Grand Canyon. Gold has just been discovered on the far side, and there is no viable way to reach it other than to cross the canyon. If you asked them for ideas on how to cross it, here’s what you might find:

• The reactionaries would deny that the canyon could be crossed.
• The future-resistants would mutter that mules scrambling down one side and up the other are the only way to go.
• The realists would set about designing a bridge and ordering material to build it.
• The futurists would see what the realists were doing buy up all of the real estate on both sides of the bridge and cut deals with shops and developers to service and house the traffic.
• The Hyper-futurists would devise previously unheard-of uses for the gold, as well as musing about other treasures that the area might yield.

     To win the battle for customers in today’s marketplace, it is not enough to have only one kind of thinking in your senior-executive suite: It is crucial to have a well-balanced team that can ably structure your business to meet competition in its multiple aspects.
     Since the rate of change has accelerated over the past few years, you must have futurists who keep your company just ahead of the curve, and who start building today for what they know tomorrow will demand.
     You also need a significant group of realists to maintain the business and to develop what you currently have. You probably still need a future-resistant sprinkled in to make sure that the whole team maximizes its asset values and doesn’t go sailing into a painted horizon.
     Since it is highly unlikely that any cable company or programming service is in the market for an entire new team, you need to evaluate the skill sets of your present operation and see where development is necessary in order to achieve balance.
     One disarmingly practical suggestion: Make sure that the next senior executive carries with him/her a blend of some of the more important characteristics needed to balance your futurists and realists.
     Search for someone with a consumer-products-marketing background who believes enough in the new technology to incorporate it strategically into what works today and what will work tomorrow.
     This executive would combine both vision and a commercial sensibility from the viewer/consumer/subscriber perspective, and put himself/herself into a position to develop and guide the direction of your operation to tomorrow’s victories.
     Additionally, he/she should demonstrate a bottom-line orientation and leadership skills to persuade the rest of the team to make the changes that are needed to meet the challenges.
     The ideal candidate will listen to, but never blindly follow, the hyper-futurist, and he/she will be strong enough to disregard the reactionary, while blending the best from the others. A consummate dealmaker, your next hire should have strong people skills and an ability to manage by example.
     In that simple way, you can bring balance to the ship as it plows ahead, without fear of either sailing off the end of the earth or breaking apart into so many digital fragments.

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Brad Marks in chairman and CEO of Brad Marks International.