• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 12, 2007

Fifteen months after surprising the media world by taking a job inside a major media company, the industry's best known consultant Michael Wolf has resigned as president of MTV Networks. The move is the latest in a series of top management shakeups at Viacom over the past year - a year that coincided with its split up from CBS, and which was supposed to drive its growth both strategically and among shareholders.

The move follows Wednesday's resignation of Gail Berman as the No. 2 executive of Viacom's Paramount studio unit, and the firing of former Viacom chief and one-time MTV wunderkind Tom Freston, who has been blamed for passing on an opportunity to acquire MySpace.com and catapult Viacom into a dominant online player.

It's been a rocky year for Viacom for sure, but Wolf tells MediaDailyNews that his resignation was all part of a plan, that he has accomplished most of what he set out to do organizationally, and that this is the ideal time for him to step down. He also said he would soon reemerge in a senior management role at another major media company.

"I have decided to leave. This was never a long-term gig for me. It was always intended to be transitional to help Judy build up the organization she needed," says Wolf, referring to MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath. Among other things, Wolf says his brief tenure at MTV saw the restructuring of the networks' advertising sales organization, its cable affiliate sales team, and the creation of a digital media sales group, as well as the acquisition of more than $1 billion in Internet related acquisitions.

In a related move, MTV Networks also announced the departure of Nicole Browning as president of affiliate sales and marketing.

Wolf, in fact, played a very direct role in MTV's advertising sales efforts, leading its upfront strategy and playing a hands-on role in last year's deal-making while the ad sales group was still in a transition after the retirement of long-time sales chief Larry Divney. By most accounts, MTV beat the cable upfront sales marketplace by a wide margin, in what was an especially difficult upfront sales season for sellers.

He also installed Hank Close as president of domestic ad sales for MTV Networks, and hired Nada Stirratt from Advertising.com as executive vice president-digital advertising to oversee MTV Networks burgeoning online and new platform sales team.

In other moves, Wolf recruited Colette Chestnut from WPP's JWT unit to serve as CFO and Adam Cahan from Google as executive vice president business strategy and development of MTV Networks, and was a key player in MTV's acquisition of online media asset Xfire.

Wolf joined MTV Networks after long, colorful stints as the media industry's top management consultant at McKinsey, and at Booz Allen Hamilton before that. During those years, he had the ear of the industry's most powerful media titans and helped influence their direction. At MTV Networks, he succeeded McGrath's long-time No. 2, Mark Rosenthal, who left for what also proved to be a relatively short-lived job as head of Interpublic's now defunct Interpublic Media Group.

While Wolf says the timing of his departure was all part of a bigger plan, he inevitably will be seen by some as another casualty in the ongoing turmoil in the executive ranks for Viacom, and the fact that Chairman Sumner Redstone, and CEO Philippe Dauman reportedly have been frustrated by their inability to convince Wall Street that the once cutting edge "new media" conglomerate is moving quickly enough into the new world of media 2.0.

"Managing the transition of our business from the traditional linear world to one that embraces a digital world is our No. 1 priority," Dauman told investors in November.

An MTV spokeswoman says the company is searching for a new president-COO and a new head of affiliate sales and marketing and that Rich Eigendorff, executive vice president-COO of MTV Networks' music group, will lead the transition and search under McGrath.