Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon Hardcover – 1 July 2002

Batten . Harvard Business Review Press . English

Twenty years ago, who'd have believed that millions of viewers would follow the twists and turns of storms developing across the globe with the rapt attention once reserved for thriller movies? And that a single television channel could simultaneously inform and entertain us, enrich our lives and, at times, help save them? This is the remarkable story of The Weather Channel, a cable network that succeeded when almost all the experts predicted it would fail. Told by one of the key figures in the network's success, former Chairman and CEO Frank Batten, this is at once a deeply personal account of high-stakes entrepreneurship and a fascinating case study of a media business both experiencing and driving major change. There are colorful personalities from the on-camera meteorologists to the whiz kids recruited to help build the company's core technology. There are adventures and dramas-from the glitch filled national launch that was saved by luck and a mysterious stranger to The Weather Channel's near-death experience as its owner, Landmark Communications, was poised to lose its entire $31 million investment in the network.

Categories: Action & Adventure

About the Author

I'm the author or co-author of numerous books of interest to managers. These include histories of the Harvard Business School, New England Electric, Cummins Engine Company, The Weather Channel, and Perdue Farms; a book on corporations and architecture for Herman Miller, Inc.; a history of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy; the definitive guide to art in public places (Going Public); and books on numerous other subjects, ranging from logistics in the Gulf War (Moving Mountains) to entrepreneurship (Low Risk, High Reward) to the inner workings of the commercial real estate industry (The Real Estate Game, and Creating and Growing Real Estate Wealth). In 2005, I published my first murder mystery (Murder at the B-School). Another is in the works. (Thanks for your patience.) I'm about to publish my first biography--The Man Who Sold America--which focuses on the life and times of Albert D. Lasker (HBR Press, summer of 2010). I think it's an amazing story, of interest to a wide range of people: advertising and PR executives, baseball buffs, students of American political history, people with an interest in bipolar illness, and anyone who likes a good yarn. I'm a graduate of Amherst College and the Program for Management Development at the Harvard Business School. I worked as a consultant to a number of companies and schools in the Boston area in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, I became the editor of the Harvard Business School Bulletin, beginning a relationship with that school that has continued since then, and has led to many other engagements in the worlds of education and business. In 1989, I co-founded Kohn Cruikshank, Inc., a Boston-based consulting firm that served corporate and institutional clients until September of 2001, when we moved to Milton, Massachusetts and became The Cruikshank Company, Inc. I've worked on capital campaigns and development-related work for Harvard Law School (two campaigns), MIT (two campaigns), the University of California at Berkeley, the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Massachusetts, Fenway Community Health, North Shore Medical Center, the Shackleton School, Milton Academy, Phillips Andover Academy, the Peddie School, Boston University, and many other institutions.

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