One thought that sticks in my mind is the lengthy planning period (starting about 6 years ago) of slotting O’Brien as Leno’s replacement . It was common knowledge that Leno would leave The Tonight Show in 2009, and hand over the reigns to O’Brien. NBC had all these well-known plans in place so the only major surprise was shifting Leno to an earlier time slot — which in the end was a ratings fiasco for the network.

To me, it would seem that maybe — just maybe — O’Brien should have been given a little more time to grow his way into the role of Tonight Show Host. That would have been a more considerate and open-minded approach.

I wonder if there were any meetings that involved all the players — Zucker, O’Brien, Leno as well as other NBC execs — but I doubt it went that way. Maybe several brainstorming sessions coupled with some up-close and personal negotiation among all involved would have culminated in a different result. Such meetings may have gone a long way toward helping create that paradigm of cooperation and conscious capitalism — a meeting of the minds.

NBC attempted to manipulate O’Brien back toward his old time frame of after-midnight which would not have been the “Tonight” Show but the “Tomorrow” Show, as Conan wryly asserted. Ultimately, after much soul-searching, he chose to walk away — albeit with many, many millions of dollars.

Jim, thanks for the thought-provoking blog post. Yes, of course taking some of the personal factors into consideration could have been a significant step toward enlightened cooperation and what is termed conscious capitalism. NBC’s decision (and in the end, Conan’s decision) also had the ripple effect of thrusting O’Brien’s entire staff into the unemployment ranks. His staff had uprooted themselves from New York to move to LA and they are understandably unhappy, according to news reports, that O’Brien is just walking away without even taking a chance with the 12:05 slot he was offered.

Sheryl Schlameuss Berger