Every Monday, Barry Diller, the veteran US media entrepreneur, and his senior lieutenants gather to talk about how business is performing, discuss strategy and plot possible acquisitions. Very often, they will still be there at the end of the day.
The intense and often combative meetings at the low-key Manhattan offices of InterActiveCorp (IAC), where Mr Diller is both chairman and chief executive, are known for generating ideas, as the group has evolved from a traditional cable TV and film media group into the owner of travel, shopping and other interactive services. And for giving those concepts a bruising working over.
Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief financial officer and one of a four-strong Office of the Chairman (OC), which includes dealmaker and vice-chairman Victor Kaufman and general counsel Julius Genachowski, says: "If Barry and Victor agree on something, the instinct is that I'll automatically disagree."
Mr Diller himself, who is by turns enigmatic and intimidating, says: "I like - and have always liked - the creative conflict of ideas businesses. All you're trying to do is get to the truth."
Not everyone shares the approach, however. Mr Diller once invited Rupert Murdoch to sit in on a very heated strategy meeting. Afterwards, the exasperated media mogul warned his associate not to pay too much attention to the views of subordinates. Mr Diller says: "Rupert said: 'It's not a democracy'."
But then Mr Diller believes that, as well as transforming people's viewing or shopping habits, interactive media is changing the way companies are run long after the dotcom boom. He says the success of a traditional movie studio rests on a handful of decisions made by one or two of its executives. "Contrast that with interactive life, which is utterly upended, and where thousands of people make a difference. It is really a profound change. Look at print: the value is in the editorial hands and the control of a very few people. The same is true in media generally. The exact opposite is true at IAC."
Later, he adds: "We have 25,000 employees - 10,000 of them are receiving incentive bonuses because they have real additional value.
"That one difference is almost everything. It's a totally different management process."
After a career at Paramount Studios, ABC, Fox Television and USA Networks, and several failed bids to create a US television empire, Mr Diller is still building an ambitious operation. Only this time, it is not in network television.
Sixty per cent of IAC's earnings come from travel businesses and his office is littered with reminders. There is a picture of his yacht by his computer. To one side, there is a bust of a flying angel, and nearby a brass globe.
Mr Diller says: "We have made this incredible change from being a media company to being interactive. We've taken all the blood out of the body and replaced it with a different blood type."
Following the sale of its US television assets to Vivendi in May 2002, the group snapped up a range of businesses from travel websites to 'personals' (as IAC calls its dating services) and online lenders from the wreckage of the dotcom bubble.
Large shareholders marvel at the lack of competition for these assets. At the same time, most of IAC's top executives are all too aware that there is almost no precedent for the type of group they have created. Most internet survivors, such as eBay and Yahoo, are organised around single brands and have been largely driven by organic growth.
Mr Diller says: "You get to create what you want because you have no legacy. You make it up because this is an organisation with the hope of becoming an institution."
More cautiously, Mr Genachowski, a former lawyer at the Federal Communications Commission, says: "Everything that we did was the result of taking it logically, step by step. We try to get a bunch of bright people in a room to sort it out."
Mr Diller's personal role, however, should not be understated. A notoriously persistent negotiator, he persuaded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft to sell him a stake in their travel operation, Expedia. Who else would have persuaded Jean-Marie Messier, then chief executive of Vivendi, to pay such a rich price for USA Networks TV assets?
"If you look back at the history of the company, all the transactions that we did could only have been done because it was Barry Diller leading the company," Mr Kaufman says.
Others would argue that luck has also played some part. In 1999, Mr Diller was ready to merge his then USA Networks group with Lycos, the internet portal, but the deal was scuppered by shareholders.
Mr Diller insists the deal was structured in such a way that it would have been a success, although it is hard to imagine that the merged businesses would have survived the subsequent collapse in valuations of web portals unscathed.
Some observers have expressed concern at IAC's heavy weighting to travel, especially given the mounting competition for online airline bookings, car rentals and hotel rooms - not least from leading hotel chains developing their own web services - and questions over potential liabilities for US state occupancy taxes.
Mr Diller is unfazed about his travel exposure. He says the revenue and profit mix between travel, home shopping and personals will become more balanced over time.
But he is in no particular hurry: "Here's the deal - we're the fourth-largest travel company in the world, both on and offline. We are looking at acquisitions, but nothing of an enormous size. It will go where it goes. It has what we believe are sensible margins. It's still relatively young in its adoptive curve. I would like, in three to five years, for travel to be 30-40 per cent of my company. But it could be 90 per cent. I am not going to twist the tourniquet to make it a balanced portfolio."
Like other media entrepreneurs such as John Malone of Liberty Media - who owns 20 per cent of IAC's ordinary stock - Mr Diller has robust views on demands for short-term strategic changes from some investors.
He is also scathing about certain aspects of the corporate governance debate in America, where public pension funds and shareholder activists have become increasingly vociferous about companies such as Walt Disney - where chief executive Michael Eisner counts Mr Diller as a friend - or Coca-Cola, where Mr Diller is a non-executive director.
Casting himself as a cheerleader for American entrepreneurs and risk-taking, Mr Diller is due to make a high-profile speech in Washington next month on corporate governance.
For the moment, he confines himself to saying: "There are a group of media hedge players who all run in a pack and look for prey. None of them is much interested in long-term strategy."
IAC's longer-term strategy involves riding out problems such as the squall suffered in its personals business last year, dominated by its Match.com and uDate.com brands. That division saw fourth-quarter profits slide 84 per cent to €1.26 million.
"We went from a few thousand subscribers to 880,000," explains Mr Diller.
"We changed the model, thinking we could change the pricing and get people to stay subscribed for longer, which turned out to be just dumb and [it was\] over in a few months."
He sees the personals business - which now has more than one million subscribers - changing from what IAC calls "a private and convenient environment for meeting other singles" into a networking and database business. "That is ideally what interactive should be about," he adds.
A greater focus on operations, rather than acquisitions, also chimes with a revival in US investors' appetite for internet IPOs, which means that in the near future dotcoms will be harder for InterActiveCorp to pick up on the cheap.
Privately, some investors question whether IAC management will show itself to be as adept at day-to-day management as it has been in dealmaking and wonder how it will cope with potential changes to online regulation or new competitors.
IAC's executives argue that these concerns are overplayed. But it is almost certain that, come Monday morning, they will once again be debating how best to prove the doubters wrong.
