Freston on Axing: 'Sometimes You Need a Kick'

If Sumner Redstone thinks Tom Freston is still kicking himself for not snapping up MySpace when he had the chance, he's in for some disappointment.

Asked what he considers the biggest mistake of his career, Freston didn't even mention the social networking site -- even though his failure to acquire it cost him his job running Viacom.

"Oh, gosh, there are so many [mistakes] I don't know where to start," he tells Big Think, an interview site that launches next month. "I don't know whether I want to admit them. I never ranked them in terms of the biggest.

"You know, when you're in a creative business, let's face it -- all the record companies passed on Madonna. Half the record companies passed on the Beatles. You don't know a lot of times what's gonna turn into, like, you know, some great hit."

No, you don't, but Big Think -- which bills itself as "YouTube for ideas" -- seems to have a pretty good shot. It's backed by former Harvard president Lawrence Summers and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and it's already scoring interviews with people like Mitt Romney, Justice Stephen Breyer and Blackstone CEO Pete Peterson.

Later in the interview, Freston expressed a philosophical view of his firing -- an easy enough thing to do when your pink slip came with an $85 million check attached.

I've always said you should do several different things in your life. Have a bunch of different chapters or parts. And sometimes you just need to be kicked into the next part; or you know just for sake of comfort or repetition you end up doing the same thing maybe longer than you should. So I'm exhilarated now.
It's been a bit of an adjustment period, but.... Say if you're a CEO of a public company, a lot of it you're playing defense. You're dealing with problems or crises. At the moment in the smaller life I have for myself I've got a lot less of that, which is a good thing.

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