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OK, many of you – if not most – are probably too young to remember the 1960’s hit by Ronnie & the Daytonas titled “Little GTO.” But I’m taking a little editorial and musical leeway to use it here to talk about the general subject of the people at the top of the corporate food chain, the company CEO.
It’s certainly a hot topic these days on so many levels:
For starters, a lot of big corporations have lost their CEOs over the past few months, from retailers like The Gap and Victoria’s Secret to big brands like Diesel, VF and Calvin Klein. At least eight Fortune 500 companies do not have permanent CEOs right now and Business Insider names ten retailers without one.
Secondly, the CEO position is not exactly a picnic these days at many troubled companies, particularly one in the home products space, Bed Bath & Beyond. The beleaguered retailer has had four over the past four years, including the current holder Sue Gove who started in the interim role and then took on the job officially.
Thirdly, interim titles for CEOs are like being an interim manager for George Steinbrenner’s Yankees of the 1980s when the tenure was often measured in games… not years.
And lastly, on the other extreme you have the insane and positively vulgar compensation packages paid to CEOs of big companies. They don’t even have to be successful at running those companies and often they aren’t. But that doesn’t stop them from making exorbitant amounts of money that would cause rock stars and NFL quarterbacks to be a little jealous. Nobody said the world was fair.
But then there’s the CEOs who earn their keep and truly make a difference. When Hubert Joly was picked as the surprise CEO of the big electronics chain Best Buy in 2012, many people had given the retailer up for dead. He was an unlikely choice with little hands-on experience in running a big national retail operation. But all he did was bring in some very basic tactics, combining fixing the most obvious problems with some unorthodox ideas on how to treat the company’s employees.
And it worked. Joly’s time as CEO will be the stuff of Harvard Business School case studies for decades (and by the way, he’s teaching there himself now, too).
More recently another big retailer that folks were already writing eulogies for was Barnes & Noble, which became the whipping boy for Amazon and couldn’t get out of its own way to respond. Under the ownership of James Daunt from the U.K, the retailer turned around by using a clever mix of localizing assortments and giving more autonomy to individual stores. From a chain that was closing locations faster than just about anybody else in retailing, Barnes & Noble is now expanding again with that same successful strategy.
The point of all this meandering is that being CEO ain’t easy, whether you’re running a $100 billion company or a local independent specialty shop. The scale may be different but the challenges are often the same.
But a good CEO makes a difference and those companies without one are risking their very survival. They may get paid too much and sometimes aren’t worth it but a good one can make all the difference.
Without a good leader, as Ronny and the boys said, somebody could very well be “going to shut you down.”
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