There are some senior executives in this business whose intelligence you might be inclined to question. I won’t name anyone; I’m sure one or two spring to mind. But I betcha CBC topper Richard Stursberg is not one of them.

Clearly, Stursberg is brighter than most. I’ve watched him talk circles around a pack of reporters out for blood. He proclaimed the moon to be made of Swiss cheese with such conviction – it was obvious, really – that they were left gasping like a catch of walleye flopping around the bilge of a boat.

‘Stursberg is expert at positioning,’ says one industryite – well, several, actually, to paraphrase a bit. ‘Remarkably savvy politician’ and ‘very strategic’ – that kind of thing. The man is smooth.

But does that kind of aptitude translate to running the joint effectively?

I know what you’re thinking. Stursberg is not in fact CBC’s ‘topper’ – he’s EVP of English services. He and Sylvain Lafrance on the Radio-Canada side share the number three position after chairman Tim Casgrain and president and CEO Hubert Lacroix. But both of them happen to be new, and neither has radio or television at the top of their resumes. Given the void above him and the fact that English CBC is far bigger than Radio-Canada, Stursberg is for the time being the de facto head of CBC. Some even refer to him as ‘King Richard,’ although Stursberg himself says he hasn’t heard that one.

‘He may be new, but there is a president who’s going to be arriving,’ Stursberg said in a December phone interview, deferring to Lacroix.

Certainly Stursberg has done well for himself. His posts over the last decade include Canadian Cable Television Association president and CEO, Star Choice president and CEO, and Telefilm Canada executive director. Then, in 2004, he joined the CBC as EVP television.

He’s a lobbyist, strategist and bureaucrat. What he’s not is a man of the people. If he had intentionally set out to alienate his CBC staffers from the get-go, he couldn’t have done much better.

The outcry began when he was parachuted into the job, and things went downhill from there. Stursberg was the face of a two-month lockout of staff – perhaps even more so than former Ceeb president and CEO Robert Rabinovitch – as well as the outsourcing of CBC’s publicity department, the shuttering of the Broadcast Centre’s cafeteria (now that hurts!), the axing of three highly respected shows (Da Vinci’s City Hall, This Is Wonderland and The Tournament), and the introduction of reality TV to the pubcaster’s schedule.

Stursberg himself told producers with whom the Corp was trying to establish a better relationship that he expected audience benchmarks of one million for dramas, and, most recently, that CBC should think of itself as Tim Hortons as opposed to Starbucks. (‘It’s just a metaphor,’ he says now, when pressed. ‘People took it seriously at a level it wasn’t intended.’)

How could so clever an individual be so apparently blind to the sensitivities of his workforce and collaborators?

One insider ruminates that maybe Stursberg was meant to be Rabinovitch’s hatchet man, ‘which is weird, because Rabinovitch is not exactly a teddy bear.’ And now, his old mentor is gone, Casgrain and Lacroix will take some time to find their sea legs, and Stursberg is in charge of the CBC’s venerated radio service. No wonder everyone’s nervous.

Here’s the thing. It’s not a popularity contest, and being a consummate manager, Stursberg can take the heat.

‘I think it was time for somebody to come in and make some changes at the CBC,’ says someone who works closely with the pubcaster. ‘It was time to shake it up a bit.’

Three years in, things are shaky all right. But how’s he doing? Given the NHL lockout in the 2004/05 season and the CBC staff lockout in 2005, Stursberg points out that his first year was spent firefighting. ‘It’s strange – I feel I’ve only been here for two years instead of three,’ he says.

Two years, then. Employee morale aside, TV ratings are up ‘a hair’ in terms of share, according to one independent source. The Corp is plunging into multiple platform integration with MyCBC, and – Hallelujah! – it’s even spending some coin to promote The Tudors and upcoming drama series jPod and The Border. Notwithstanding the Intelligence fiasco – in which a series that has been acknowledged across the board as groundbreaking was allowed to wither on the vine – the pubcaster is moving in the right direction.

And Stursberg is at least saying the right things about radio. ‘Radio’s been doing an outstanding job. Why would someone want to go fix something that isn’t broken?’ he says. ‘I would like the CBC as a whole to be as popular, as relevant, and as loved as radio is now.’

As we all know, actions speak louder than words, and on this one, an angry mob is watching the newly crowned King Richard very, very closely. Unless he delivers, this upcoming stretch will be Stursberg’s – and more importantly, the CBC’s – Waterloo.