Postcards
Chelsea Handler's tips for negotiating a $25 million deal
November 18, 2011: 1:29 PM ETThe $25 million two-year deal that Chelsea Handler just chalked with the E! network says something about the enterprising queen of late-night TV talk. She sure knows how to negotiate.
Chelsea Handler at the MPW Summit Credit: Asa Mathat
"I do behave badly and I get paid well for it," Handler told Piers Morgan on CNN (TWX) last evening, adding, "It's a really good time to be me."
Last month, when I interviewed Handler on stage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, she was in the middle of negotiating with NBC Universal's (CMCSA) E!--playing hardball, dropping hints that she might leave for a rival network.
When I asked her for her best negotiating tips, here's what she said:
"I don't listen to anyone or any advice because I know exactly what I want and how I want it."
And when an agent or a manager says, 'You can't ask for that...that's not done," what does Handler say? "Well, why don't you go ask?!"
"And then you get it," she said, instructing the MPW audience: "You have to ask for what you want. Just because there are parameters that have been set doesn't mean they can't be blown open."
For what it's worth (that is, $25 million), Handler's new contract with E! calls for her to continue to be host and executive producer of Chelsea Lately through 2014 and develop other projects through her company, Borderline Amazing Productions. Handler's company produces her After Lately, a spinoff show, as well as Chelsea Lately, which is the most-watched late-night talk show among female viewers, 18 to 34.
An increasingly valuable franchise at NBC Universal, Handler is, in addition to her E! deal, executive producing and appearing in Are You There, Chelsea?, a sitcom based on one of her best sellers, Are you There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea. The show will premiere on January 11.
Of course, a stand-up comic does not turn herself into a multi-media brand without rewarding the folks who helped her along the way. To celebrate her E! deal, Handler decided to give $1,000 cash to each of 138 staffers.
Yes, she is generous--and cunning too. "I probably shouldn't say this," Handler told me at the MPW Summit, going on to explain how she sometimes uses her staffers as negotiating bait to get sweet deals for herself. Here's Handler on her ultimate negotiating tip...
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Sheryl Sandberg's hero: Somaly Mam
Somaly Mam is a hero. Nick Kristof said so in his op-ed column in the New York Times this past weekend. Kristof raided a brothel in Northern Cambodia with this amazing woman who has become the guiding light in fighting forced prostitution around the world.
After escaping a similar brothel, where she was raped and tortured on a daily basis for years, Somaly Mam found her purpose. She devoted her life MORE
Patricia Sellers - Nov 15, 2011 10:00 AM ET -
Evelyn Lauder: How many lives did she save?
Evelyn Lauder, who died of complications from non-genetic ovarian cancer on Saturday, had a swarm of close friends throughout her life. Yet many close friends who attended her funeral today did not have a clue that she would die so soon.
Classic Evelyn. "It was never about her. It was always about you," Liz Robbins, a prominent Washington lobbyist, told me this morning over breakfast before she headed to the invitation-only MORE
Patricia Sellers - Nov 14, 2011 1:22 PM ET -
Frances Hesselbein's life in leadership
When Frances Hesselbein was CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, she believed that "only the best is good enough for those who serve girls." Her philosophy drove a turnaround of that struggling organization and led to friendships with CEOs like Alan Mulally of Ford (F) and management master Peter Drucker.
Hesselbein met Drucker at New York's University Club in 1981--an encounter that turned out to be life-changing. After leading the MORE
Colleen Leahey, Reporter - Nov 9, 2011 12:18 PM ETPosted in: Alan Mullaly, CEOs, Ford, Leadership by Geoff Colvin, Most Powerful Women, Personal Power, Postcards -
How Intel helped Sean Maloney recover from a stroke
"The Man Who Couldn't Speak," about Intel executive Sean Maloney, is one of the most rewarding stories I've done in my 27 years at Fortune. I met an amazing man, got to know an extraordinary family, and came to understand the heroic feat of recovering from a stroke.
I didn't have enough space in the current issue to tell the full story of this man who had beaten the odds already MORE
Patricia Sellers - Sep 26, 2011 1:55 PM ETPosted in: Intel, Personal Power, Postcards, Sean Maloney, Silicon Valley, sports, stroke, technology -
Billie Jean King's surprising secret to success
What is the No. 1 trait that has led to your success?
Warren Buffett's is focus—according to Alice Schroeder, author of the Buffett bio Snowball, who spoke, as I did, at a corporate event at the U.S. Open last week.
Getting ready to go on stage, I thought, what's my key trait? Curiosity, I guess. It keeps a journalist alive and open to ideas.
So I was innately curious to interview Billie Jean MORE
Patricia Sellers - Sep 6, 2011 11:04 AM ET -
Google VP Marissa Mayer's mobile challenge
Last Monday evening, in the backyard of her Silicon Valley home, Marissa Mayer stood before a crowd of 200 fellow Googlers and their significant others, fed them roast quail and herb-crusted roast bison loin, and feted them for going mobile.
"We walked more than once around the earth at the equator—or 16.7 times around the moon," Mayer declared at the award celebration for the fourth annual "100 Mile Month Challenge."
This is MORE
Patricia Sellers - Aug 29, 2011 1:06 PM ET -
Keys to success from Avon's top boss
In every successful career there is a moment: You could quit. But you resist, wisely.
For Andrea Jung, the chairman and CEO of Avon Products (AVP), this moment happened right after college, when she was in the management training program at Bloomingdale's. All day everyday, there she was in the stockroom, switching vendor hangers for store hangers on thousands of pieces of clothes. "I remember calling my parents around Thanksgiving and MORE
Patricia Sellers - Aug 9, 2011 2:20 PM ET -
Managing up: Advice from Pfizer and Xerox execs
"How do you manage up?" asked a young woman from the audience at the Forté Foundation's MBA Women's Conference.
It was a bold question--and one that Kristin Peck, the fast-rising Pfizer (PFE) executive who was on the panel that I moderated, answered unabashedly.
Peck knows from experience. She is Pfizer's EVP in charge of Worldwide Business Development and Innovation, a perch that she reached only by surviving a slurry of management dysfunction MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 28, 2011 5:00 AM ET -
Disney's Anne Sweeney talks authenticity, acting, and autism
FORTUNE -- As the most powerful woman in children's television, Anne Sweeney meets a lot of girls who wish they were Selena Gomez or Miley Cyrus or tomorrow's superstar.
But Sweeney insists that she sees plenty of accomplished women in business who do that very same thing.
"I see a lot of women of every age trying to be something else," says Sweeney, the co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 19, 2011 2:34 PM ET
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In her first public interview since taking on the CEO gig at Yahoo, Marissa Mayer outlines her priorities both in and out of the company. Watch
Brenda Barnes famously quit a big job to be with her kids. Years later, a massive stroke nearly killed her--and her daughter returned the favor. Watch
Fortune senior editor at large Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Marissa Mayer: Ready to Rumble at Yahoo," "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), and "Remodeling Martha" (Martha Stewart). She has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" package every year since its launch in 1998. Pattie is Executive Director of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business and beyond. She oversees MPW programs that enable women leaders to extend their influence and empower the next generation—such as Fortune MPW Entrepreneurs and the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Beyond her Fortune duties, she is also developing Live Content across Time Inc. Pattie grew up in Allentown, PA, graduated from the University of Virginia, and started at Fortune in 1984. Her blog, Postcards, is about how power players lead, manage others, and navigate their careers.
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The Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership brings rising-star women from countries around the world to the U.S. for three-week mentorships with participants of the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit - among them Ursula Burns of Xerox, Laura Lang of Time Inc., Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, and Tory Burch.
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