America has an ongoing corporate love affair with the "seasoned ceo." It's visible in the way that seasoned ceos hop from company to company leaving a wake of failures behind them. It's championed by advisory boards, venture capitalists and business schools. How this culture came to be I'll never know. I can only say that nearly every seasoned ceo and advisory board I have encountered lack the imagination, resourcefulness and depth of insight to grow a very small company.
I think you're using the word "America" more than a little too broadly.
The inability to "grow a very small company" is hardly limited to small companies. E.g. look at the HP board starting a bit before they hired Carly. Or read Optical Illusions, a book on the failed spinoff of Lucent. AT&T insisted on putting a "seasoned CEO" of a diesel engine company in charge and the board was cut from much the same gray haired cloth.
They knew how to handle the "being a public company" bit of things (talent which inside AT&T wasn't jumping to Lucent) but they were totally unable to provide adult supervision here it really counted. (I could go on, and am particularly interested in this having worked for Lucent in 2001; when I started out they had 106,000 employees, when I left they were targeting 35,000....)
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America has an ongoing corporate love affair with the "seasoned ceo." It's visible in the way that seasoned ceos hop from company to company leaving a wake of failures behind them. It's championed by advisory boards, venture capitalists and business schools. How this culture came to be I'll never know. I can only say that nearly every seasoned ceo and advisory board I have encountered lack the imagination, resourcefulness and depth of insight to grow a very small company.
I think you're using the word "America" more than a little too broadly.
The inability to "grow a very small company" is hardly limited to small companies. E.g. look at the HP board starting a bit before they hired Carly. Or read Optical Illusions, a book on the failed spinoff of Lucent. AT&T insisted on putting a "seasoned CEO" of a diesel engine company in charge and the board was cut from much the same gray haired cloth.
They knew how to handle the "being a public company" bit of things (talent which inside AT&T wasn't jumping to Lucent) but they were totally unable to provide adult supervision here it really counted. (I could go on, and am particularly interested in this having worked for Lucent in 2001; when I started out they had 106,000 employees, when I left they were targeting 35,000....)