1. You may not have heard of Phil Kent. After all, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting is a whole lot quieter than Ted Turner, the so-called Mouth of the South who remained front and center long after selling his cable empire to Time Warner in the 1990s. But Kent has emerged from Turner’s shadow and is fast becoming one of Time Warner’s most important executives. If the media giant spins off its long-troubled AOL division as expected, the collection of channels that Kent oversees—including TNT, TBS, TCM, and CNN—will contribute nearly half of Time Warner’s earnings. In the past six years, Kent has taken on the broadcast networks with a smorgasbord of programming matched by few other cable outfits. As more ad dollars flow from broadcast to cable networks, he is on a mission to get advertisers to pay as much for time on Turner as they do the Big Four broadcasters. It’s a campaign Kent plans to press in the coming weeks as advertisers gather in New York for the annual ad-buying ritual known as the upfronts. Kent, 54, is the fi rst person to run Turner without the looming presence of its mercurial founder, who stepped away from Time Warner in 2006. As such, Turner is a much changed place. “Under Ted,” says Time Warner CEO Jeffrey L. Bewkes, “the top management was always Ted.” Whereas Turner reveled in making his own news, Kent is the antithesis of the media executive. Although he learned the business working for legendary Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz at Creative Artists Agency in the late 1980s, he finds Tinseltown self-promotion repellent and abhors the cult of the CEO. “He’s definitely not a rock star chief executive,” says Steven R. Koonin, one of Kent’s top lieutenants.
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3. Questions 
4. 1. How would you describe Phil Kent’s personal leadership style? 
5. 2. What traits do you think he is high on? 
6. 3. What behaviors do you think he is likely to engage in? 
7. 4. Do you think Phil Kent is a transformational leader? Why or why not?