Christie Hefner, former CEO of Playboy Enterprise, wants someone to write a book about the things she decided not to do as head of one of the world’s leading erotic brands. “Everything I did always got so much hype around the company and externally from the media, but no one knows about the things I decided not to do,” says Christie. Like there was this one time, when Hard Rock Cafes and themed restaurants were all the buzz. “Every solid brand was coming out with a chain of restaurants and an agent came to me and proposed that Playboy come out with at themed restaurant too. The second he told me we could put my dad’s slippers on the wall, I said heck NO.”
Listen
Being a good leader is about listening, says Christie. She found that most of her success at her 20 years at Playboy came from surrounding herself with an intelligent and diverse team of people to help her along the way. She also found that when the company was struggling in her earlier years, not everyone wanted to know every harry detail about how much financial trouble the company was in. “They just wanted to know how I was fixing it.”
Dare to Be Bold
Us college kids are in a new career-age, according to Christie. Before us, our grandparents and parents worked in the system with 3 stages of life: school, work, retirement (where all the fun stuff happens). Now, that idea is shifting and people don’t want to wait till they retire to travel the world, buy a boat or volunteer at the soup kitchen. So instead, people are working longer and retiring later to make room for their career and hobbies. “This is really cool because you kids have so many options. When I was growing up there was a set way things were done, but now.. heck you could graduate college and go work on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin for a year before working on Wall Street and no one would think anything less of you.”
Learn
Education shouldn’t stop. “If you stop learning after you graduate college, prepare yourself for a long, boring, unfulfilled life and career.”
Exercise your Intellectual Agility
Christie talked about “intellectual agility” as the ability to adapt yourself in a business situation, not based on the skills you may or may not have, but based on your natural smartness. This means seeing the big picture, knowing your company (or magazine’s) identity
inside and out. “You’d be surprised how it doesn’t even occur to many people out there to figure out a solution to a business issue. So many business professionals are just like machines. They do what their told, but thats it. I looked for that really sharp person who could think for themselves, imagine that.”
Measurable Progress
“Being a leader is always harder for good leaders than it is for bad ones because they have much more invested, they see the big picturemore clearly and they can foresee negative outcomes of their decisions.” Christie learned how to lead by talking to people lower down in the company. She started an internal newsletter system where every week she’d report her activities as CEO to show the company what progress she had made. “I’d sit down for the week and think about what I’d done, and if I’d only made a few phone calls and had some meetings, well that wasn’t good enough. So I’d rehash out my goals and keep chomping at the bit until we made the change happen.”
Meeting with Christie Hefner last week (or a few weeks ago?) was an enlightening experience. When she spoke to our group of magazine journalists she addressed problems the publishing industry faced. When she spoke to a larger Newhouse journalism school audience, she talked about her career (and inserted some juicy stories). She also touched on two possible print and online media market solutions to solve the free content dilemma.
Many students were thrilled that she came to Newhouse, and they shared my sentiments on meeting her and learning from her years at Playboy. Some people were absolutely not happy that she came, perhaps because her company, arguably on of the world’s strongest brands, is also a huge staple of the porn business. Regardless, she offered insights into stronger business models that adapt for the digital revolution we find our selves in, and her advice applied across the board to marketing, advertising, publishing, business, public relations etc.
Hopefully by doing this series you readers have enjoying getting into the head of the nation’s longest standing female CEOs and one of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women. Christie is responsible for turning around the floundering Playboy brand during her tenure there, and she puts it best when she said: “Playboy did well not because it was competitive with the delivery of explicit sexual content — in fact, it never was — but because it was able to create a world that was a combination of intelligence, entertainment and lifestyle that appealed to young men. . . In a world where there is more media than ever — more clutter, if you will — the power of the strong brand is greater than it may have been 40 years ago.”


When former Playboy CEO Christie Hefner spoke to our small group of magazine students, she shared her insights on why Gourmet Magazine folded, what problems the mag industry faces, and two possible solutions to make our future as magazine journalists just a little brighter.
iTunes Fix:
World of Warcraft Fix
“The main challenge for all professionals now is to think in a different way than we did even just 5 years ago,” she says in reference to how the world has developed digitally. The US is way behind the rest of the world when it comes to spreading content across digital platforms (blogs, texting, mobile devices, internet, email–everything counts) . Thats basically a fancy way of saying that even though it feels like the US has branched out in the last three years with technology (like iPhone apps, smart phones etc) European and Asian consumers are ahead with how they can use technology to access information–its so much easier to buy stuff online, make reservations for restaurants or get magazine content on your mobile device in Europe and Asia. Even though getting content on a mobile device isn’t the same as a bigger computer, laptops are becoming a thing of the past. The US is working on it, but magazines have a huge potential for growth in this area, and a lot of digital ground to catch up on. 



This all sounds great, but magazines are not, I repeat, not making a sustainable profit, if at all. The main weakness in this model lies in the lack of magazines to make consumers pay their fair share for content. Think about your magazine subscriptions: you pay, on average, between $0.50 and $2.00 per issue. If you buy one on the newsstand, you’ll pay between $5 and $7. Thats a huge price discrepancy.Throw in access to free content online –you can go to your magazine’s website and click on stories, read issues for free digitally, click into blogs, take quizzes, register for contests– so why the hell buy the magazine in the first place? That’s how more and more consumers are starting to think, and its resulting in a publishing mess. Magazines are folding left and right. “It goes back to the canary in the colemine– newspapers.” says Christie. “Magazines don’t have the same magnitude of challenges that newspapers do, but putting up content online for free, plus the loss of classified ads, have sent newspapers down the drain. Now magazines are feeling the effects of free content online.”
When I asked Christie what she thought a reasonable price for a magazine was (obviously we’re biased since we put so much effort into them) she laughed and said, “You know, thats a good question because I don’t really have an answer. I think what a good magazine and a good brand can bring to someone is invaluable, but I’d venture to guess that consumers would be willing to pay a price somewhere in between the $6 newsstand price and the $.50 subscription price. Charge $2 to $3 an issue, readers who don’t love the mag will leave but you aren’t losing money and newsstant prices go down so there’s an opportunity to attract new readers.”
I didn’t have time to google Christie Hefner beforehand so I had no idea what she looked like. When this gorgeous 57 year old woman, came up to me and extended her tiny hand for a handshake, I was astonished. Honestly, part of me expected a young, blonde bomb shell with an enormous bust and a tiny waste to breeze into the Miron room at Newhouse–maybe as Hugh Hefner’s daughter, I thought, she’d look something like a slightly older version of the Playmates in the magazine. I was wrong. She reminded me a lot of Michelle Obama. Through fashion, she rocks her feminine side in a once-male dominated professional world . She appeared to be in great shape, and at 57, shes definitely wasn’t afraid to show off a little leg in her designer cream skirt-suit.
Christie was fresh out of college, she was 22 years old and interested in law, journalism, and politics. Her parents split when she was 5 years old and she lived with her mother, her step father and her younger brother in Chicago. Back in California, Hugh invited her out one weekend just to show her the business after graduation. He knew she needed a job and according to Christie, probably wanted to spend some time together, so he asked her to work for the company for a year while she sorted out her other interests. “I said okay, sure, why not, and that’s when I learned your life never goes in the direction you think it’ll go in.” So she signed on and worked all over the company–branding, marketing, research, advertising, sales.
