Beware would-be media moguls bearing visions

Today is the day Seagram's long-patient shareholders finally get to vote Edgar Bronfman Jr. out of their lives. They should give him one last rousing round of applause for finding a sucker (er, buyer) willing to pay big dollars for the famed Canadian company before its stock fell to levels that would have made a lucrative deal all but impossible.

In its place, investors, led by the Bronfman family, acquire a stake in a French conglomerate and its boss, a man named Messier who can't play hockey but has a vision of the electronic future and his place in it that makes Mr. Bronfman's own public musings seem shortsighted by comparison.

The thing to do with a visionary, if you're a stockholder in a deteriorating market worrying about results, is to stay far, far away. Especially when that visionary is talking about unproved business models, unachieved synergies and the awesome potential of the global music business.

Just dig up some up old speeches by Edgar Jr., add the magic words "wireless Internet access," and you'll have a sense of the vision of Jean-Marie Messier, the latest corporate chief who would much rather be an international media and entertainment mogul -- and, not coincidentally, France's leading public face of the New Economy -- than a boring, young industrialist any day.

Mr. Messier, chief executive officer of Vivendi SA,the giant French utility and construction company he has transformed into a media and telecom force, is brilliant -- as he would be the first to acknowledge. A former classmate at an elite French school for the best and the brightest described him as "a man of firsts," the youngest and most accomplished graduate of his class who went on to notable successes as a civil servant, investment banker and now as a significant player in the always exciting global media biz.

But the old classmate, today a prominent banker in his own right, added the following: "He was trained to be a bureaucrat in the classic French tradition. These men do not think like your entrepreneurs."

By that, the banker means we're not looking at a Sumner Redstone or Rupert Murdoch here, although he is every bit as ambitious and a known micro-manager.

When asked if Mr. Bronfman, who has been named vice-chairman and second-in-command, would last even two years under Mr. Messier's iron rule, the banker replied: "Six months would be a better guess."

Mr. Bronfman, for one thing, speaks no French, a fact painfully obvious to those who have attended Seagram annual meetings in Montreal, about the only time the Manhattan-born and bred scion of Canada's most celebrated business dynasty ever ventures north of the border. That's only a drawback if you assume Vivendi's French executives in charge of Internet and other businesses nominally under Mr. Bronfman's direction actually ever need to talk to him.

A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows that under his employment contract, Edgar will primarily be responsible for music -- which is already run by capable U.S. executives -- and the spirits and wine operations, which were supposed to have been sold by now and most certainly will be by early in the New Year.

The heads of the on-line activities, including Vizzavi, Vivendi's 50-per-cent-owned Internet portal, are also supposed to report directly to Mr. Bronfman.

Edgar, don't get up too early for those transatlantic calls. And in any case, you may want to distance yourself from Vizzavi. That's the European wireless baby that's been touted by Mr. Messier as the key to the company's future as a dominant Internet player. But the early returns don't look good.

Five months after the launch of the mobile Internet platform, owned jointly with Vodafone, only about 100,000 French customers have signed up; and technology to enable speedier Internet hookups via cellphones is still off somewhere in the future. Meanwhile, powerful competitors such as Yahoo and AOL aren't exactly standing still.

It's an open question whether the Bronfman family, which must retain its Vivendi-Universal stock for only 90 days, will stay the course while waiting to see if Mr. Messier's master plan pans out. But plenty of Vivendi shareholders have already made their choice. The stock is down nearly 40 per cent since the deal was announced in June and more than 50 per cent since its 52-week high in March.

When Edgar Jr. followed his father and grandfather to the top of Seagram, he was the brightest, most ambitious and least educated of his generation. He was also determined to make his independent mark and preserve the family billions.

He specifically did not want to be a coupon-clipper in charge of a bunch of passive assets. Yet that may very well be what lies in store for him under Mr. Messier's tenure. bmilner@globeandmail.ca