Listen, I know you guys are smart out there and you try to read everything, but knowing my own lacks, I am betting that perhaps not every one of you was locked onto The New York Times business section on November 23 to read the assessment of Oprah Winfrey’s "good-bye to all that" in David Carr’s column called "The Media Equation."
 
So, if you read it; well and good – and shame on me for believing that perhaps you didn’t. And if you didn’t read it, well, I’m here to give you the gist. You can, of course, go back and read the whole thing for yourself on the Times website, but I’m betting you won’t, so here goes.
 
David Carr went backward from everybody else who covered Oprah’s announcement that she intends to quit 20 months from now.

***

What did columnist Carr do that was unique? He didn’t give us chapter and verse about all the astute things Oprah has done in the years of her ascension and before planning to quit. He didn’t write up all she’d done to make success happen. No, he examined what Oprah had NOT done in her astounding career – the "nots" that add up to her net worth of over $2.3 billion.

1. She never took her company public.
2. She never christened her own book imprint.
3. She never stuck her name on any merchandise.
4. She did not license her name to a magazine; she built one herself.
5. She never engaged in behavior that tarnished her name.
6. She never made big deals just for the sake of synergy and never got addicted to "doing deals" because they were there to be made.
7. She never made dubious investments, never let in-house corporate politics boil into public view, she never got involved in businesses she didn’t understand.
8. She never hung on past her prime.

David Carr explains all of this and elaborates much better than I can. (He also cites Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, Barry Diller, Miramax/Talk, David Letterman, AOL/TimeWarner, Sumner Redstone and Midway, Michael Eisner, Edgar Bronfman, Jean-Marie Messier, "and just about everybody else in the media world" as examples of people who did do negative things!) I liked his suggestion that Oprah’s "gut intuition, about knowing when to say no and when it is time to go, is worth studying at every business graduate school in the country."
 
All of us women can take tips from this valuable column by the foremost observer of media in America. I congratulate the [ITALS]Times for David Carr. I congratulate Oprah for having him understand her only too well.
 
I also hear from someone close to her that Oprah just loved this column. I don’t wonder. I wish I were as perspicacious as David Carr and as rich as Oprah.