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People and Pop Culture

From the archives: Charlotte Jones Anderson

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Nov. 24, 2008. The following are excerpts from a SportsBusiness Journal profile of Charlotte Jones Anderson.

Anderson looks like a willowy, feminine version of her father, and she has been blessed with the same wide-angle creativity. It’s no surprise that she’s the ultimate authority for the [Thanksgiving Day] halftime show: She invented the idea in 1997, pitched it to Jones and Dick Ebersol of NBC, and has booked the acts and produced the event for 11 halftimes over three networks.

What does surprise most people who haven’t worked directly with the Cowboys — and even some who have — is how many other aspects of the franchise fall under her purview. Her input in the organization “isn’t always easy to fingerprint,” said her brother Stephen, the team’s COO, “unless you’re in the organization.”

Anderson’s title is executive vice president/brand management/president of charities, but in practice that can mean almost anything. She led the efforts to get a Super Bowl, Final Four and other leading events for the team’s new stadium being built in Arlington, Texas, but she’s also responsible for picking the pavement composition for the sidewalks that will ring it. “She’s such an integral part of the Cowboys,” said Robert Cluck, the mayor of Arlington. “And when she takes on a project, she’s there to the end. She’s also incredibly effective. I have to say that I don’t think we’d have gotten the Super Bowl if not for Charlotte.”

Stephen and Jerry Jr., the team’s general counsel, are the more visible members of the family’s next generation. They hold down positions that are easy to describe, and they have counterparts at every team around the league. They’re also men, like the vast majority of NFL executives.

But over the nearly two decades that the family has owned the Cowboys, the business of sports has been transformed from a small, backward-looking industry mostly selling a single product to a large and multifarious one. Such growth has allowed Anderson, who is charged with defending and extending the most valuable brand in America ’s most profitable league, to have an off-the-field impact that belies her public anonymity.

Anderson, at construction of The Star in 2016, has worn many different hats for the Cowboys.
Photo by: AP IMAGES

“She works under the radar, but Jerry and Charlotte run one of the best businesses around, in sports or anywhere else,” said Ed Goren, the president of Fox Sports. Added her brother, Jerry Jr., “My father is the first one to say, ‘I get credit for a lot of things Charlotte comes up with.’”

Anderson may not be under the radar for long. When the billion-dollar stadium opens in June, it will give her one of the largest canvases in America for her business creativity. “The stadium means that we start running our football team even more like a corporation than like a football team,” said Jerry Jr. “With all its moving parts, I think you’ll see her more and more visible from now on. And rightfully so, considering everything she does.”

The temptation exists to compare Anderson’s role to that of other top female executives at NFL teams, such as Oakland’s Amy Trask and New Orleans’s Rita Benson LeBlanc. In reality, nobody — man or woman — does quite what Anderson does. “You’ve got road maps of how to be a GM, how to be president of a franchise,” Jerry Jones said. “There’s no road map for Charlotte’s position.”

Anderson is perhaps the primary beneficiary of her father’s management style, which isn’t taught in any graduate school. Areas of organization are separated by “blurred lines, not bright lines,” in his words, so employees and executives can gravitate to areas of interest. That means Anderson can play a sort of corporate free safety, picking up responsibilities as they emerge. “Her job is really a chief executive job, but entrepreneurial,” Jones said. “It helps that she has such an effective ability to communicate with her peers, her brothers, her mother. And our family smiles about her ability to communicate with me. When it’s a tough message, she’s the one that’s sent in to tell me.”

— Bruce Schoenfeld

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