Nine CEO is out the door and it was only a matter of time

As the Bette Midler song goes, “You got to have friends”, and in the end, it looks like outgoing Nine Entertainment boss Mike Sneesby just didn’t have enough of them.

The countdown to his exit started the minute Sneesby’s greatest board ally – former chairman Peter Costello – left in June following the alleged scuffle with a News Corp reporter at Canberra Airport.

Former Nine chairman Peter Costello and outgoing chief executive Mike Sneesby.Credit: James Brickwood

Sneesby, along with Nine’s board, copped a no-confidence motion from rank-and-file staff at Nine soon after that. There was the industrial action (from the publishing division, which includes this masthead) at the start of the Olympics and the ongoing efforts to tackle the cultural issues that came to the fore courtesy of the sexual harassment allegations that engulfed Nine’s television division in May.

That Sneesby is now headed for the exit is no surprise: we had been gearing up to write his corporate obituary months ago.

Specifically, it was Thursday, May 30, when I was given a heads-up that the Nine directors were hunkered down in a board meeting, called by Sneesby, that would decide his fate. He had been under crippling pressure for his response to ballooning sexual harassment allegations.

Senior broadcast executive Darren Wick had been buried under an avalanche of claims spanning years that exposed a toxic culture within the organisation that had been allowed to fester. Wick had gone, which Nine said was his own decision, and he had been given a $1 million payout.

The optics couldn’t have been worse.

On that Thursday in May, with the Nine’s internal Slack channels clogged with conjecture on when an announcement would be made about Sneesby’s future, we waited.

At 4pm, word finally came down the chain. Sneesby had survived.

We may never become privy to what happened inside the Nine boardroom that day. But at 4.02pm Sneesby, Costello and the head of human resources, Vanessa Morley released a joint announcement to staff that conveyed a determination to fight on in the face of intense pressure from its staff, its competitors (who were circling what they considered to be a wounded beast), governance detractors and a few nervous shareholders.

The countdown to Mike Sneesby’s exit from Nine Entertainment started the minute his greatest board ally – former chairman Peter Costello – left in June.Credit: Janie Barrett

Nine would commission an external independent review, establish a dedicated sexual harassment hotline, conduct an anonymous survey on sexual harassment, and have all staff complete refreshed sexual harassment prevention training.

This, the board presumably reasoned, was enough to allow it and management to maintain a holding pattern – at least until the contents of his external review came to light. That big reveal, we now know, is scheduled for late October. Sneesby will leave the business on September 30.

The investigation will almost certainly reveal cultural rot in parts of the business. The real question will be the degree of it.

As for the timing of the announcement of Sneesby’s departure, it’s no accident that the Olympic and Paralympic Games – which Nine has successfully broadcast – came to a close this week. Meanwhile, the major cost-cutting drive, which involved redundancies across broadcast and publishing assets, is still making its way through the system.

A carefully worded staff message on Thursday conveyed an ambiguous message about who made the decision for Sneesby to resign.

“Recently when our Board opened a discussion with me about my tenure, we agreed that the timing was right to commence a leadership transition.”

Three and a bit years in the job is well shy of the average chief executive’s tenure. The mutual agreement suggests the board agreed it was time for Sneesby to go.

So, how did Sneesby do in his relatively short tenure? Well, the market value of Nine since his elevation to the top job has fallen by 60 per cent, so shareholders aren’t necessarily going to line up with tributes.

Sneesby’s greatest achievement, creating the streaming service Stan, was the reason he was Costello’s captain’s pick for the chief executive job in 2021, and while he did progress Nine’s digital ambitions across publishing and broadcasting, the group’s legacy assets are still vulnerable to buffeting from structural and cyclical winds. Nine’s latest results, in which its earnings fell 12 per cent, is testament to that.

With no replacement lined up, investors will be waiting anxiously to see whether a top-drawer executive can be parachuted in or whether Nine will follow Seven’s lead and elevate the chief financial officer – Matt Stanton in their case – to the role.

And with Sneesby now out of the picture, the board will be left to contend with whatever emerges from the forensic investigation of Nine’s culture.

It will be fascinating to see how this game of survival plays out.

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