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Leo J. Hindery Jr., 49, may be little known outside the cable industry, but that's about to change. Recently named president of Tele-Communications Inc., Hindery overnight has become one of the most high-profile cable executives, second only, perhaps, to TCI Chairman John Malone.
To the cable cognoscenti, Hindery is no stranger. In just over eight years, the founder, managing general partner and chief executive of InterMedia Partners, a San Francisco-based MSO, has grown his company into a top 10 operator with 1.4 million subscribers. Hindery cut his teeth at The Chronicle Publishing Co. of San Francisco, where he was chief officer for planning and finance.
(Hindery is also well known on the stock car circuit. With veteran Richard Petty as his mentor, he has become skilled enough to race in the NASCAR Winston West Series.)
Reared in Washington State, Hindery picked crops during summers, then worked his way through high school with a full-time job at a Safeway. Hindery paid for college with stints in the merchant marines, as a sheet-metal worker and at UPS. He graduated from Seattle University, a Jesuit college, and holds an honors MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.
From there, it was on to Utah International Inc. for a nine-year stay, then to the New York investment banking firm Becker Paribas Inc., where he was CFO and managing director before leaving to join Chronicle in 1985.
In the following interview with BROADCASTING & CABLE'S Price Colman, Hindery does some straight talking-complete with biblical allusions and a down-home delivery that makes self-deprecating what might otherwise seem hubris-about what's ahead for TCI.
Characterize your top priority at TCI. One general answer and one specific answer. The general answer is that I will do whatever John [Malone] feels is helpful to his agenda here. There's only one person I'd work for at this point in my career, and that's John Malone.
Specifically, we believe these cable operations can be run somewhat differently to greater effect. I have no sense that they're broken. That's not a phrase I ever intend to use. They're not broken.
This is an industry that has had a dramatic, decade-long period of ownership consolidation. What's not clear to me or John is whether operations consolidation should have...