In baseball, you get three strikes and you're out. As for technology CEOs, that depends. It depends on the magnitude and visibility of their screw-ups, the aggressiveness of the board, all kinds of things.
Sometimes it just takes one event, if it's big and hairy enough. On the other hand, I've seen CEOs swing and miss dozens of times for years on end, and they're still in the game.
Let's take a look at five recent examples of CEOs getting canned and see what we come up with:
Patricia Russo of Alcatel Lucent. It came as no surprise when Alcatel Lucent announced on July 29 that CEO Russo would step down. She had a decent run at the helm of Lucent, but the 2006 merger with Alcatel has been a disaster for both companies. This is a great example of one huge, high-visibility strike doing a CEO in. Incidentally, Chairman Serge Tchuruk is out, as well. ... Read more
Technology executives are notorious for their out-of-proportion egos and hot-headed tempers. Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs-- even Andy Grove--are all members of a long list of distinguished high-tech executives who are famous for not suffering fools lightly, among other things.
But what happens when they're the fools? What happens when a high-powered executive has his head up his you-know-what and has lost all sense of objectivity? What happens when a gutsy employee speaks up? Well, in many cases he gets his head chopped off for his trouble. In shrink speak this is called transference, which in this case means unconsciously taking one's own feelings of inferiority and guilt out on another.
Given a choice, the vast majority of people would rather forgo the whole decapitation thing rather than declare that "the emperor (or should I say executive) has no clothes." Not surprisingly, this phenomenon is rampant in the technology industry. ... Read more
We've seen a horde of semiconductor spin-offs these past 10 years. Why all of a sudden? Companies are refocusing on core competencies and unloading unprofitable, sometimes debt-ridden businesses. There's also an ongoing and apparently interminable disaggregation of the electronics industry.
The latest trend is for semiconductor companies to spin off product or application-focused companies. I'm not sure that's always the right move, but you'll see a lot more of that in the coming years.
Here are 10 notable chip divestitures. A bunch of them went public during the tech bubble--exciting for them, not so much for long-term investors who, for the most part, took it in the shorts. ... Read more
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