Team building: latest criterion for CEO hunt

When the shares deflated earlier this decade, after the burst of the tech bubble and various corporate scandals, a new cadre moved in: the Fix-it Men. They were lower-key leaders like Charles O Prince III of Citigroup and Richard D Parsons of Time Warner, whose job was to repair the excesses and mistakes of their predecessors.

Now, management experts and longtime watchers say the current environment demands yet another kind of chief executive: the team builder. “Someone who can assemble a team that functions as smoothly as a jazz sextet,” said Warren Bennis, a professor at the University of Southern California.

Last week, Prince and Parsons both announced they would be stepping aside. Prince’s exit followed huge losses that dragged down Citigroup’s long-stagnant stock.

A third chief executive, E Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch, was forced out late last month after his firm announced a $8.4-billion write-down. O’Neal substantially increased Merrill’s revenue and profit but has been criticised for forcing out subordinates he perceived as rivals.

CEOs like A G Lafley of Procter & Gamble or W James McNerney Jr of Boeing are considered as archetypes of the new model, according to Bennis. They have won plaudits not merely for their personal style, but also for their bottom-line performance, with shares of their respective companies outpacing the likes of Citigroup and Time Warner over the last two years.

Jeffrey A Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for executive programs at the School of Management at Yale, says the style of today’s best CEOs differs from both the empire builders and the cleanup specialists. The former were known for public swagger and boardroom-size egos, while the latter often excelled at a narrow set of skills, he said. The original archetype was, as he says, “the custodian,” leaders who came of age during the Organisation Man era of the ’50s, but were overwhelmed by the rapidly shifting economic landscape of the ’70s and ’80s.

They were followed by the empire builders who focused on mega-mergers and financial management in the ’90s to deliver the growth, while getting big enough to achieve economies of scale and beat foreign competitors. The cleanup artists arrived in the wake of the collapse of Enron and WorldCom and the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which tightened government oversight of public companies.