“People thought magazines were really on their last legs,” he says.

But in his two years at Time, he was able to develop an agressive marketing department that increased subscriptions and revenue, which he says “changed totally the economics of the publishing business.”

After business school, Dunn worked briefly in the banking industry at Bank of Boston but he says he became “tired of laying off people” in the wake of the depression of the late ’80s.

In 1993, when he was working for the management consulting firm Arthur D. Little, a fledgling cable network called Dunn for an interview.

Nickelodeon was still small at the time, with a revenue in 1993 of about $150 million. This past year, according to Dunn, revenue is over 10 times that at $1.6 billion.

You Can’t Do That On Television

Dunn says he saw the TV network as a golden opportunity to work in a new media, fusing his interests in journalism, business and children, and he says he saw potential for the combination of movies, books, television and computers.

“It just seemed logical that the computer would facilitate media all coming together,” Dunn says.

He also says he wanted to have a job that would have a positive effect on youth.

“It will change my life, but what it’s really going to do is change my kids’ life,” Dunn says. “If you want to have an impact, working with kids is really how you change the world.”

Dunn married his high school sweetheart, and together they have two sons.

“I think the biggest moment of my life was the birth of my first-born,” he says.

Nickelodeon, he asserts, was the first television network to treat children with the maturity they deserve.