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would be standing on a street corner and hearing someone say, “Hey, did you see that great show on CBC last night?”
    But the major hurdle was persuading people that “popular” was not a synonym for “dumb.” Many worried that high ratings and high-quality programming were incompatible. When I asked how they defined “high quality,” they often fell back on the “I know it when I see it” argument. Yet what I saw, and what I tried to persuade many of them to see, was a tragic disconnect that prioritizes winning New York Festivals awards over producing programming that Canadians connectwith—dangerous, especially, when it’s the viewers who pay for the CBC.
    Producing programs both smart and popular, I thought, was the best way out of the hole we’d fallen into. If we didn’t make shows people wanted to watch, we risked losing even more relevancy—and revenue: the advertisers would turn away. At the time, government funding covered about half of what it took to run the CBC. If there was a drop in advertising revenue, we’d be in big trouble. It was a very fine balancing act for sure, but I was certain we could get there. And once we’d earned trust from both the audience and advertisers, we could take them to really interesting and adventurous places. But that would take time. We had to lay the groundwork and build.
    For every Murdoch Mysteries —one of the most popular and acclaimed series on the network—programmers created the breathing room to try something more risky elsewhere on the schedule, as we did in 2008 with The Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town . It was a delicate balance but one we needed in order to survive, to pay the bills for essentials such as television news, which, done right, was expensive, and radio, which was less so, but didn’t generate revenue. CBC had a lot of important reasons not just to exist but to thrive, and it was putting itself in jeopardy by not grabbing the reins where it could.
    Not everyone agreed with me. When I toured the country talking to staffers, I also held town halls, along with the heads of comedy and drama, to ask viewers what they wanted to see on their public broadcaster. I brought my schedule of the new programs I’d lined up, and some in the audience were livid, particularly diehard CBC fans with a long-standing connection to the network. One evening on the east coast, afamous local actor stood up and said, “How dare you! You’re a public broadcaster and you’re doing reality TV?”
    â€œOkay,” I said, “is there a public broadcaster you think that we should look up to? Who should we be emulating?”
    â€œThe BBC,” he replied.
    I reminded him that the BBC broadcast Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, Dancing with the Stars and Who Do You Think You Are? —all reality-TV programs. And, unlike the CBC, the BBC had chosen to run these popular shows without any need to generate ad revenue. (The BBC is funded by the sale of television licences, and has no need to supplement its government funding with commercials in order to survive.)
    That heated exchange was emblematic of the unrealistic expectations thrown at the CBC. But step by step, we renovated the creaky primetime schedule, adding popular shows like Being Erica , reinvesting in stalwarts like The Nature of Things and The National , and Wheel of Fortune (yes, we aired that show, too!) started to turn in CBC-TV’s favour.
    Then Deliver the Goods
    THERE ARE MOMENTS AS A LEADER when speed and decisiveness matter above all else. Being decisive endures as one of the critical attributes of any leader, especially when these days of big data present opportunities, and dilemmas, by the gigabyte. Decision-making has generally been synonymous with taking action, which may be why it’s traditionally considered a strength of male leaders, as in a “man of action.” Presumably, in the