Stop the Fight

It's one of the toughest challenges facing senior executives in fast-moving companies filled with young people: How do you provide direction without trampling on your team's passion for autonomy? How do you stay part of the team without letting the inmates run the asylum? It's a challenge Benerofe has mastered. "If there's one thing I've learned from youth culture, it's that playing the hierarchical game is dumb," he says. "You have to share knowledge. And you have to earn your stripes. You have to show that you have five times as much energy as anyone else."

It's strange, of course, that a 39-year-old executive has to earn his stripes. Especially an executive like Benerofe, who spent most of his career as a boy wonder: one of the youngest executive producers at CNN, the youngest director at Prodigy, and a hard-charging manager at Microsoft, where he initiated the MSNBC partnership. But in the youth-obsessed world of the Web, Benerofe is a gray hair. Recently, when he lunched with a young programmer at a Chinese restaurant, Benerofe had to explain the menu: "He was such a kid, he didn't know anything but chow mein." Then, in the middle of lunch, the programmer, skeptical of his companion's Net-cred, asked, "Do you have an email account?" Benerofe couldn't help himself: "Since you were in diapers!" he replied.

Part of Benerofe's style is to recognize the importance of an informal workstyle to the people around him. The Station, one of the Web's most popular games and entertainment sites, sits inside Sony Online Entertainment, which sits inside one of the world's biggest entertainment conglomerates. But he runs the unit like a startup. He ignores company rules about working hours, vacation time, and sick days. "I get paged at 2 a.m. when a server goes down," says David Berk, 26, a senior systems engineer. "If Mark expected me to come in early the next morning, I wouldn't stick around."

Indeed, Benerofe treats his staffers better than they might treat themselves. "This might be the only industry where people would volunteer to work 24 hours a day," says Matt Rothman, 40, the former general manager of Sony Online Ventures who hired Benerofe. "Young people don't know always how to pace themselves. Mark helps them do their work without killing themselves."

When one of his producers, Ines Ferre, 25, sent him an email from work on a Saturday, Benerofe wrote her back - and urged her to take some time off: "He thanked me for my work. He also said he was worried about me burning out." So she took a vacation.

But Benerofe's most important role is as a buffer and champion - resisting bad ideas from above, celebrating great performances from below. Once, when a Sony executive in Los Angeles licensed a new technology for The Station's operating system, he emailed Benerofe's programmers, insisting they install the technology at once. The programmers were irate: They considered the technology worthless. They worried that installing it would distract from real work - revising Jeopardy!, the site's most popular game.

"Why would we annoy our loyal following by installing this stuff?" asks Berk. "Just so some guy in LA, who hardly ever uses a computer, could feel cool?" He brought the problem to Benerofe's attention. "It dropped off the face of the earth," Berk says.

But as Benerofe insulates his staff from the hierarchy, he also makes sure that it gets lots of visibility. Last winter, Benerofe was part of a forum for top executives where Sony unveils its latest products. In the middle of the session, he phoned Ferre and Berk and invited them to attend. Later, sitting between Ferre and Berk, in a room with Sony President Howard Stringer and 50 top Sony executives, Benerofe made sure that his staffers were conspicuous.

"People say this generation is disloyal," Benerofe says. "But they're not disloyal. They're focused on their professional growth and learning. They should be." Berk agrees: "Inside a corporate monolith, it's easy to feel like you're some anonymous person. Then you find yourself in a room with all these people you've heard about for so long. I felt really important in that session."

Though he acts like one of the kids, Benerofe, who's balding and has a middle-aged paunch, can't escape occasional jabs about his age. "The good thing about Mark," Berk says in front of his boss, "is that he doesn't try to get in there and mess with code." The boss, who recently left his full-time affiliation with Sony to consult with the company and return to Vortex Communications, a strategic-planning firm that he formed six years ago, laughs it off. "I have a pretty high tolerance for talented people," Benerofe says. But on bad days, when he is at his "most insecure," he admits that he looks at some of his young stars with admiration that borders on envy: "Why didn't I have their skill set when I was 25?"

How Different Is Different Enough?