Organizational ledership at the Huffington Post - Essay Example

The researcher states that Arianna Huffington currently serves as President and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which following the acquisition of her website in 2011 by AOL, includes responsibility for a number of associated online properties owned by the multi-media conglomerate. Huffington’s leadership and organization ability was clearly recognized by AOL at the time of the acquisition, and she appears to have taken on even more responsibility at the new company than she had when The Huffington Post was independent.

Arianna Huffington recently became embroiled in a media turmoil related to corporate management at AOL when she effectively fired Michael Arrington, the editor and founder of the popular ‘TechCrunch’ blog which had also been acquired by AOL. Despite the widespread acknowledgement of Arrington’s conflict of interest in publishing stories on venture capital themes and start-up companies in which he was also to lead investment in, many analysts were surprised more by the apparent power that Huffington had acquired within AOL itself in corporate management.

Arianna Huffington’s rise to power, wealth, and fame spans 60 years from her birth in Greece, education at Cambridge, and activism in conservative Republican causes for her husband in the 1980’s, to running for governor of California in the 1990’s and founding The Huffington Post in 2005. She is widely regarded to have changed the way news in published, read, and discussed with her blog and social network driven website. A review of Arianna Huffington’s life and organizational leadership style depict a portrait of an extremely powerful, well connected, and successful woman who has achieved a position of strength in America’s cultural, political, and corporate environments that few other figures in history have achieved. 2) The Current Situation of the Huffington Post The AOL Company of today, led by CEO Tim Armstrong, is a vastly different organization than the original “America Online” company that merged with Time-Warner in 2000 under the direction of CEO Steve Case.

The AOL merger has become a case study in business management and is seen as one of the worst corporate management mistakes of all time. AOL emerged as the gateway to the internet for millions of first time users in the late 1990’s through its telephone-based ISP services. It has since come to be seen as one of the leading examples of the “dotcom” era, the huge speculative frenzy that coincided with the initial internet boom in the stock market. (Case, 2011) At the time of the merger in 2000, AOL had a market value of around $163 billion dollars, and was considered on equal standing with the media giant Time-Warner in value based on market capitalization.

(Johnson, 2000) Nine years later, Time-Warner “spun-off” AOL from its business organization, as a new company with a second IPO, and its market capitalization was just over $3 billion dollars. (Bavdek, 2009) AOL’s dial-up based ISP business had been made nearly redundant by advances in broadband, wireless, and mobile technologies. What remains unclear is why the Time-Warner-AOL merger failed so badly, in that management was unable to bring any value from the venture or integration between all of the media channels, internet sites, and cable networks brought together under the single company organization.

Instead, a staggering $160 billion dollars of market capitalization was lost or squandered by the deal through corporate managem