Retention? Not at the top
by Miki SaxonToday, the value of retaining employees and customers, instead of constantly replacing them, is considered vital to a company’s health. It’s a concept that’s evangelized by executive coaches, consultants and academics for a host of reasons, most importantly, raising productivity and sparking innovation.
Retention is hot everywhere except the corner office where, to date, 1,112 CEOs have left. Some retired; and some are being ousted for playing financial games, most recently with stock options, but a large number just couldn’t move a multi-thousand person company from zero to 60 within their first 100 days.
Retirement is understandable and greed deserves everything it gets, but the Street’s impatience is the largest contributing factor to the destruction of American business. As Paul R. Charron, soon-to-retire CEO of Liz Claiborne Inc., says, “The market has a very short attention span. It’s easier to criticize than to construct.”
And there you have it. The 212-year-old force that was instrumental in building the most powerful industrial nation on the planet could be just as instrumental in presiding at its demise.
November 6th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
[…] I’ve received a number of calls telling me, politely and otherwise, that I didn’t know what I was talking about in the final sentence of Retention? Not at the top; that, in fact, it is CEO performance alone, not Wall Street, that impacts tenure. […]
June 4th, 2007 at 9:18 am
[…] a post last November I said, ” The 212-year-old force that was instrumental in building the most […]