Free Our Turn by Kirstine; Stewart Page B

when our ability to do a job well becomes so effortless that it outweighs any anxiety about actually doing the job. It’s generally low-risk and stress-free. There are times in a career when the comfort zone job is precisely what you need—when havoc breaks out in your personal life or you’re hatching entrepreneurial plans while carrying on with a day job. But I have always felt that comfort-zone jobs invariably lead to boredom and restlessness. Stepping into an uncomfortable zone can be scary, but it also can be a wild and exhilarating ride drivenby raw curiosity—your own. There’s a curiosity about the job itself, but also about whether you have the stuff to do it.
    Did the CBC sound like a daunting challenge? You bet. Even as I went through the lengthy run of one-on-one and panel interviews, I continued to turn over the pros and cons of actually taking the job. Ultimately, the words of a good friend silenced my concerns. Donna Bevelander, an executive at Alliance Atlantis who had once headed up media operations at CBC, told me that it would be a tough job, with too many masters, and a massive bureaucracy notoriously inhospitable to women. But, she said, it was also a place teeming with some of the smartest people in the country, and that it was the biggest sandbox I would ever play in. That was the point that was irresistible to me. But I wouldn’t have wanted to play in that sandbox if I thought there was nothing I could bring to the job.
    I’D LIKE TO THINK THAT the goal of engaging the audience was the hallmark of my four-year run as head of television programming at the CBC. Not everything worked. There were shows I commissioned that never made it to air and others that were cancelled. I faced philosophical challenges of “whither the CBC.” But there was something to learn from every setback and failure. And there were certainly more wins than losses. I was proud of the evolution I was steering and utterly humbled by the hard-working teams who pushed to remake the broadcaster into the successful media company I knew it could be. When Richard Stursberg left the top job in 2010, my fellow senior execs at CBC lobbied Hubert Lacroix, the network’s politically appointedpresident, to make me Stursberg’s successor. I’m sure their support had something to do with me being “the devil they knew,” but I believe they also felt that I had put the CBC on a good path.
    We had proved to the country, and ourselves, that we could produce a string of smart and popular shows. We won back the broadcasting rights to the Olympics from CTV and Rogers, and even as groups within the CBC argued that no one would ever watch TV on a computer, let alone a smartphone, we expanded our digital offerings so viewers could access our news and programming anywhere, anytime, through cbcnews, cbc.ca and CBC Music (a digital music service started under my watch that provides online streaming of more than fifty-three web radio services, including forty-seven devoted to specific music genres). They were initiatives I hoped set us on a path to modernize the network.
    In January 2011, I was officially named executive vice-president of CBC’s English-language services and in that first year we were making real progress. But, suddenly, progress came to a grinding halt. In March 2012, the government announced it was cutting our budget by 10 percent—$115 million over three years. It was difficult to digest the pain we were facing. Such a budget cut meant nearly 200 hours of programming we could no longer produce. It meant the cancellation of several shows and doling out more repeats. Worst of all, at least 650 people were about to lose their jobs. As awful as it was for me to contemplate how I could do my job with such cuts coming, it was nothing compared to the impact on the many fine people about to be let go.

    What made it all the worse was that I had pushed everyone to work hard for change