Know which rules to break, with MTV co-founder Tom Freston

About this episode

Tom Freston discusses his unconventional approach to corporate leadership and the lessons learned from his time at MTV.

Tom Freston is a cofounder of MTV and former CEO of Viacom. He joined host Jeff Berman to dig into the wild stories and meaningful lessons from his life as an unconventional corporate leader. Freston reveals how MTV’s audience-first mentality and “subway car” approach to hiring helped the network scale into a cultural icon.  Tom’s memoir is Unplugged: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Unplugged/Tom-Freston/9781668089798 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

People in this episode

Host: Jeff Berman

Guest: Tom Freston

Topics covered

• corporate leadership
• media innovation
• cultural impact
• audience engagement
• hiring practices

Keywords

• MTV
• Tom Freston
• corporate leadership
• Viacom
• audience-first mentality
• hiring
• memoir

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MTV, Viacom, Simon & Schuster

Books & works: Unplugged

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