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Thank You and Goodbye

When it happens, says a wise old headhunter, it is usually a quick killing. It takes about a week. “Nobody is more powerful than a chief executive, right up until the end. Then suddenly, at the end, he has no power at all.” In the past few months, some big names have had the treatment: Eckhard Pfeiffer left Compaq, a computer company; Derek Wanless has left NatWest, a big British bank that became a takeover target. Others, such as Martin Grass, who left Rite Aid, an American drugstore chain, resigned unexpectedly without a job to go to.

It used to be rare for a board to sack the boss. In many parts of the world, it still is. But in big American and British companies these days, bosses who fail seem to be more likely to be sacked than ever before. Rakesh Khurana of the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has recently examined 1,300 occasions when chief executives of Fortune 500 firms left their jobs. He found that, in a third of cases, the boss was sacked. For a similar level of performance, a chief executive appointed after 1985 is three times as likely to be fired as one appointed before that date.

What has changed? In the 1980s, the way to dispose of an unsatisfactory boss was by a hostile takeover. Nowadays, legal barriers make those much harder to mount. Indeed, by the beginning of the 1990s, chief executives were probably harder to dislodge than ever before. That started to change when, after a catastrophic fall in the company`s share of the American car market, the board of General Motors screwed up the courage in 1992 to replace Robert Stempel.

The result seems to be that incompetent chief executives in large companies are rarer than they were in 1990 . . . In Silicon Valley, sacking the boss has become so routine that some firms find that they spend longer looking for a chief executive than the new boss does in the job.