Ronald Goes is the President of Warner Bros. International Television Production, overseeing production operations outside the US with production offices in more than fifteen countries. Before joining Warner, he spent formative years at Endemol, RTL, Talpa and SBS, where he was present at some of the defining moments of the Dutch format industry, including the day John de Mol walked in with Big Brother. In this conversation, he offers one of the most analytically sharp accounts in this research of how to organise creativity at scale, why small markets outperform large ones, and what every creative leader gets wrong about the balance between business and creativity.
When Ronald Goes was appointed to lead Warner Bros. International Television Production in 2009, the then-head of the studio, Barry Meyer, asked him a direct question: “You are an accountant by training, how are you going to lead a creative organisation?”
Goes had his answer ready. He called it the scales.
“Every morning you wake up and ask yourself: what mattered more yesterday: creativity or business? The one that won yesterday, you have to embrace the other one today. You have to constantly watch how that balance shifts. Because if the spreadsheet brigade wins, you kill creativity. I dare to call them this because my own media career started in accounting. On the other hand, if the creatives win, you make no business.”
Meyer liked it so much he asked if he could borrow the metaphor.
For Goes, this is not just a leadership philosophy. It is the central operating principle of any creative organisation. The tension between commercial discipline and creative freedom is a condition to be managed, every day, in every decision.
“Every morning you wake up and ask yourself: what mattered more yesterday: creativity or business? The one that won yesterday, you have to embrace the other one today. You have to constantly watch how that balance shifts. Because if the spreadsheet brigade wins, you kill creativity. I dare to call them this because my own media career started in accounting. On the other hand, if the creatives win, you make no business.”
– Ronald Goes
Our reflections: Goes’s scales metaphor captures something that most management frameworks miss: in creative industries, the balance between creativity and business is not stable. It shifts constantly, and the leader’s job is not to find equilibrium but to notice which side is winning and correct. This is consistent with what the ecosystem research shows at the national level: the markets that produce the most successful formats are not those with the most creative freedom or the tightest commercial discipline, they are those where both forces are in productive tension.
Goes has spent his career thinking systematically about which countries produce original IP and which consume it. His classification is direct: some markets are IP givers, some are neutral, and some are IP takers.
“The US and UK produce IP that finds its way internationally almost automatically. The Netherlands is at some distance behind them but clearly an IP giver. Germany and France are IP takers, not because they lack creativity, but because the circumstances of those markets make original development less rational.”
In Germany, he argues, the sheer size of the market removes the necessity to export. A format that works domestically generates enough revenue to justify its existence without ever travelling. In the Netherlands, that logic is reversed: the domestic market is too small to sustain a healthy business on its own, so international scalability is built into the development process from the start.
He puts it with characteristic directness: in a large country, a producer who develops a hit eats steak every night from domestic revenue alone. In a small country, you can afford bread and cheese domestically. The steak only comes when the format travels. That structural difference shapes how producers think, what they develop, and how they pitch.
“For an international company, you should always pull people from small markets to the front and not push them aside. They have the international mindset built in. That’s not something you can teach easily.”
Our reflections: Goes’s IP giver and taker framework is the practitioner’s version of what the Format Innovation Model identifies as the market size dimension. Small markets innovate more because they have no alternative. The financial logic of format development in a small market makes international scalability a necessity from day one, not an afterthought. Goes has systematised this observation across Warner’s global portfolio, and his conclusion is consistent with the ecosystem data: market size is one of the most reliable predictors of format export capacity.
Goes is candid about the difference between Warner’s approach to format development and that of John de Mol. The contrast is structural, not evaluative.
Talpa is, in his reading, a concentrated bet on the blockbuster. De Mol invests heavily in the search for one game-changing format: the next Big Brother, the next Deal or No Deal, the next The Voice. Everything else is in the slipstream. The model works because De Mol himself is the creative engine and the financial guarantor: he can sustain the search because he owns a channel and can absorb losses that would finish most producers. And he has shown over and over that he can make such a model work and pay off. As one of the only ones.
Warner operates differently. With 2,500 hours of television produced per year across more than fifteen countries, the model is breadth, not concentration.
“We are not going to bet everything on one show. Even though a hit show in your portfolio does help to push your business. We need ten new things per year that find their way to multiple countries. That is how you get into the global top five of international production companies, by keeping everyone creative, across the whole pipeline. And if you play this breadth-game well, you will also get hits, since you will be able to push IP through multiple territories of your global network. It is a different way of bringing hit formats to life.”
But Goes is not dismissive of the blockbuster approach. He is, if anything, envious of it.
“I wish more people could bet on that one game changer. John plays that game better than almost anyone. The problem is there is almost no one else in the world who can do what he does, because it requires being both the creative force and the financial backer. That combination is extraordinarily rare.”
Our reflections: The Talpa-Warner contrast maps onto a deeper tension in the format industry between depth and breadth, concentrated creative bets versus diversified pipelines. Both models have produced global hits. The ecosystem research suggests that neither is inherently superior: what matters is whether the structural conditions such as rights ownership, market size and broadcaster relationships support the model being attempted. De Mol’s model works in the Netherlands partly because the Dutch ecosystem provides the launching conditions he needs. Warner’s model works internationally because it is deliberately designed to leverage local ecosystem conditions in each market rather than to override them.
Goes is honest about the formats he did not commission, did not develop, and did not pursue when he had the chance.
The most painful is Big Brother. When De Mol brought the concept to SBS in the early days of Dutch commercial television, Goes and his colleagues faced a straight choice: Big Brother or the rights to the Dutch football cup. They did not have the budget for both.
“It was a sound business decision to choose the football rights at the time. But it did not leave room for something ground-breaking. That is my lesson: I have to be more open to things that are genuinely out of the ordinary, not because they are familiar, but precisely because they are not.”
He was also offered the rights of The Masked Singer (see also our interview with the creator Wonwoo Park) before it became a global phenomenon. The format was on Warner’s desk before almost anyone else had seen it. They passed. The format was considered too out of the ordinary, too freaky, too niche.
His reflection on both cases is the same: the tendency to project past experience onto new ideas, to measure the unfamiliar against what has worked before, is the most common failure of experienced creative executives. The more you know, the harder it is to see something truly new.
“Embrace change and use it to become better. If you cannot do that, you should do something else. The industry has become too risk-averse and that is exactly when it needs more rock and roll, not less.”
Our reflections: Goes’s self-criticism connects to one of the central findings of the ecosystem research: the gatekeepers who commission formats are themselves subject to the same cultural and institutional pressures that the Format Innovation Model identifies at the national level. High uncertainty avoidance, risk-averse incentive structures, and the tendency to default to proven formats are not just market-level phenomena, they operate at the level of individual commissioning decisions. What Goes describes as his personal failure to back the unfamiliar is, at scale, the structural behaviour that defines IP taker markets. The lesson he draws for individual leaders is the same lesson the ecosystem data draws for national markets: the systems that produce the most original output are those that have found ways to make the unfamiliar feel less dangerous.