Companies get stuck here all of the time.

Just caught up with the last ‘Tonight Show’ on Tivo earlier in the week.  What a mistake is going on here. CoCo I thought was very gracious, acknowledging that NBC had been his home for most of his adult life (read — provided the opportunities for him to become Conan O’Brien).

The highlight reel from the past 7 months of the Tonight Show was amazing.  Now the CoCo faithful are engergized and are going to go/tune in/follow him big time where ever he ends up.

Raises the interesting question as to why did he get stuck?

Partially it was because NBC wasn’t reading their own old playbook and understanding that his humor takes some time to get used to (anyone remember how long it took this unknown host to get his sealegs after taking Late Night w/David Letterman?).

That being compounded by the fact that it is ‘The Tonight Show!’  Perhaps to similar to when Debra Norville took over hosting The Today Show after Jane Pauley left. (She did? Exactly!). No one was going to succeed in that coveted slot immediately and the best thing that happened to Katie Couric was perhaps the flushing out of Pauley from our system via Norville.

So now CoCo is going to go light it up on another network and is going to be strong.

But what could have been done differently?  IMO, something very simple.  Everyone needs the ability to accept and get used to change. A weekend transition from Jay to Conan was the wrong move.   It’s like starting any new job 2 days after you left your old one — you need time to personally and professionally transition.  In this case, when you’ve got millions of people tuning into you, they need time to transition as well, but they aren’t spending 24/7 thinking about it either. They think about you at your allotted time slot so its going to take a while.

They should have stuck with Jay until the summer and then sent us off into re-runs for a while, a moratorium per say, to cool down and get ready for Conan to give us his version of  ‘The Tonight Show.’

Instead, NBC chose the wrong way to play it and it cost them dearly.  CoCo will be a hit. Jay most likely too, but its certainly a big stumble that didn’t have to happen.