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LEADERSHIP
Sheila Mahony's Vanguard Award for distinguished leadership recognizes not just her 24 years of executive service to Cablevision Systems Corp., where she is a member of the board of directors and executive VR communications, government and public affairs. It also salutes a career in which Ms. Mahony has blazed trails in negotiations between cable companies and local municipalities from both sides of the table.
"I lured her to the company out of self-defense," said Charles Dolan, chairman of Cablevision and himself a past Vanguard recipient. "She was an assistant corporation counsel for the City of New York back in the '70s and was assigned the duty of developing the first cable franchise for the city, negotiating with us when we were then called Manhattan Cable," he said. "It was her job to nail down a long-term contract."
Characteristically, Ms. Mahony had a clear and very definite point of view about what the city should get for the franchise and about what cable TV should be. She told Mr. Dolan that...