Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs

Description

Corporate CEOs are headline news. Stock prices rise and fall at word of their hiring and firing. Yet we know surprisingly little about how CEOs are selected and dismissed or about their true power. This is the first book to take us into the world of the CEO selection process. With exceptional clarity and verve, Rakesh Khurana shows that corporations have increasingly sought CEOs who are above all else charismatic, whose fame and force of personality impress analysts and the business media, but whose experience and abilities are not necessarily right for companies' specific needs. The labor market for CEOs, Khurana concludes, is far less rational than we might think.

Rakesh Khurana is Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Harvard Business School.

"The most important--and timely--management book of 2002. Rakesh Khurana pulls back the curtain on ... the vogue for hiring celebrity outsiders over capable insiders... A thousand hosannas."--Fortune "[This] new book ... will surely intensify the already hot debate on corporate governance... [It] seems wonderfully rational, not to mention impeccably well timed... Recent events, of course, should make people care about the problems he spotlights. Some chief executives have either looted their companies or mismanaged them in ways that have wiped out billions of dollars of shareholder value."--William J. Holstein, The New York Times "CEOs often write their own tickets when they ride to the rescue of a company in distress. Khurana details the ways that CEO accountability has diminished and compensation has skyrocketed (while workers' pay, in real dollars, has gone down)."--Adam Rogers, Newsweek "As Mr. Khurana patiently explains, the rise of the charismatic C.E.O. has been, on balance, a terrible trend for American business... C.E.O.s have justified their ludicrous, pharaoh-like paydays with talk about supply and demand, meritocracy and shareholder value--but as it turns out, there's no steady correlation between any of these."--Stephen Metcalf, New York Observer "Searching for a Corporate Savior pulls back the curtain on how the system of CEO selection actually works... As a precondition to accepting the job, Khurana found, most candidates insist on taking both the chairman and C.E.O. titles as well as the right to stack the board with their cronies... [M]any of those C.E.O.s have transferred ungodly sums of money from shareholders to their own pockets."--Jerry Useem, American Prospect "Highly readable... Khurana shows that the damage caused by celebrities in the executive suites does not affect merely employees and investors but society as a whole."--Toronto Globe and Mail "Even if a company is in dire straits, is an outsider likely to be the best person to rescue it? Mr. Khurana insists that is rarely the case. As markets go, that for chief executives works in a spectacularly unsatisfactory way, he argues... The search process, with its emphasis on confidentiality, restricts the hunt for potential candidates and puts enormous power in the hands of the recruiting firm."--The Economist "A fascinating and grimly entertaining book."--Gene Epstein, Barron's "In his excellent, readable and highly original Searching for a Corporate Savior , Khurana lays bare the CEO search process and shows how directors at company after company favor executive glitz and corporate pedigree over demonstrated competence--and then grossly overpay their recruits while demanding miraculous results. Not surprisingly, in trying to live up to expectations, the bosses often end up wrecking the company."--Jay Hancock, Baltimore Sun "Rakesh Khurana takes a big swing at today's cult of the corporate leader, aiming to demolish a few of the shibboleths that company boards hold dear... All in all, this is a refreshing debunking of business mythology."--Simon Clarke, Human Resources