We first posted about CEO turnover in this post. Now BusinessWeek comes along with an article titled The Great CEO Exodus.
CEO’s get a bad rap about their compensation packages, but it is not an easy job. Now consider the pressure being exerted on these leaders:
Not so long ago, a new CEO like McComb would have had six to nine months to get his act together. Not any more. Management experts say the newly minted boss has about 90 to 100 days to start implementing strategy.
It would appear that there is a drastic candidate shortage even at the CEO level:
Gerard R. Roche, senior chairman of leading recruiter Heidrick & Struggles, says it’s getting harder to fill high-level openings as more candidates opt to work at private equity firms or run private companies. “We have to work harder than we used to,” says Roche. “We used to think, ‘tell us your need and we’ll give you half a dozen candidates.’ Now [those candidates] say, ‘I’ve been talking to Blackstone and Kravis and I’m thinking about going private.'”
(As an aside, don’t you love the name of the recruiting firm – Heidrick and Struggles?)
Jim Collins has a fantastic take on the CEO struggle:
In researching his best-seller Good To Great, management guru Jim Collins found that of those companies whose stocks outperformed the competition over the long term, 90% had a homegrown CEO. Why did they do so well? Because they knew which people on staff were good and where best to deploy them.Even so, Collins notes that most of these CEOs didn’t get their program humming until seven years into their tenure, just when the average company boss today is walking out the door. “The best chance for spectacular results comes from insiders who have enough time to lay the foundation that will lead to them,” says Collins. “If we’re systematically lurching for saviors and shorting the amount of time a CEO gets, we’re on a systematic path toward increased mediocrity.”