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

Rakesh  Khurana

Book | 2002

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

Abstract

Corporate CEOs are headline news. Stock prices rise and fall at word of their hiring and firing. Business media debate their merits and defects as if individual leaders determined the health of the economy. 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 often secretive world of the CEO selection process. Rakesh Khurana's findings are surprising and disturbing. In recent years, he shows, 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. Khurana's findings are based on a study of the hiring and firing of CEOs at over 850 of America's largest companies and on extensive interviews with CEOs, corporate board members, and consultants at executive search firms. Written with exceptional clarity and verve, the book explains the basic mechanics of the selection process and how hiring priorities have changed with the rise of shareholder activism. Khurana argues that the market for CEOs, which we often assume runs on cool calculation and the impersonal forces of supply and demand, is culturally determined and too frequently inefficient. Its emphasis on charisma artificially limits the number of candidates considered, giving them extraordinary leverage to demand high salaries and power. It also raises expectations and increases the chance that a CEO will be fired for failing to meet shareholders' hopes. The result is corporate instability and too little attention to long-term strategy. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of corporate culture and the nature of markets and leadership in general.

Keywords: Managerial Roles; Selection and Staffing; Personal Characteristics; Experience and Expertise; Investment Activism; Corporate Strategy;

Format: Print

Find at Harvard Purchase

Citation:

Khurana, Rakesh. Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

The Still Leading case series includes an introductory note, “Still Leading (A): Issues in Transitioning to New Forms of Service Later in Life” and 10 supplementary cases that cover the transition of highly accomplished and prolific leaders (Hon. Robert McDonald, Hon. Mike Bloomberg, Gerry House, Lee Iacocca, General Claudia Kennedy, Sherry Lansing, Dr. Evelyn Murphy, Paul Newman, Hon. Colin Powell, and Louis Gossett Jr.). The Still Leading cases are part of an opening series of cases used in the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The cases document a number of individual’s lifetime personal and professional trajectories. They focus on the nature of career processes and transitions. The materials offer an opportunity for readers to inductively reason about the structure of significant career transitions and the developmental patterns across different arenas. The cases also create a context for participants to engage in introspection by asking them to reflect on patterns of development in their own career histories.

Article | History of Political Economy | June 2017

The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital

Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana

This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,” what others have called the “shareholder value” view of the American firm. Jensen's work was embraced by a generation of corporate raiders aggressively advancing new financial practices and discourses. His contribution, commonly understood as “agency theory,” was intertwined with the transformations in corporate management and governance of the last decades of the twentieth century—from the junk bond market in the 1980s to the exponential growth of CEO pay in the 1990s to the shareholder value management strategies of the 2000s. While debates about the spread of neoliberal ideas and governance tools have largely centered on the transformations of the state and international institutions or the role of actively organized intellectual networks, this essay emphasizes the importance of identifying specific carriers of particular transformations within the space of American “business discourse.”

Keywords: agency theory; corporate governance; executive pay; the firm; Michael Jensen; Neo-Liberalism; shareholder value; Agency Theory; Corporate Governance; Executive Compensation; Business and Shareholder Relations; Transformation;

Citation:

Fourcade, Marion, and Rakesh Khurana. "The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital." History of Political Economy 49, no. 2 (June 2017): 347–381. View Details

Cite View Details Find at Harvard Purchase

Faculty & Research

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

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author