To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://management.silicon.com/careers/0,39024671,39128477,00.htm

Leader: Honour at the top
The choice of a CEO says a lot about a company

By silicon.com

Published: Tuesday 08 March 2005

CEOs come and go. That's a fact of business life. But rarely do they come and go and raise so many eyebrows.

Almost concurrently, we heard at the start of this week that Sony has appointed its first non-Japanese leader. The chosen one had a successful time leading that company in the US and will now live between New York, Tokyo and the UK, where his family is - for he is a Welshman by birth.

We wish him well and note the accelerating trend (a good one) of non-Japanese nationals injecting something different into stalwarts from that country. Car-makers such as Mazda and Nissan have led the way.

On the other hand, this week began we were also told Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher - a man brought in largely as a trusted old-school exec to steady a rocking ship - had been let go for a relationship with a female member of staff.

The woman in question remains unnamed and in her job, which Boeing says wasn't directly affected by the CEO connection.

Extraordinarily, 11 days ago Boeing chairman Lew Platt - remember him, as HP's pre-Carly CEO? - was anonymously sent details of correspondence between the two lovers. It sounds like the intercepted amorous notes could have been emails. We're still looking into this and wondering whether someone down in IT had an axe to grind or was genuinely in tune with the aerospace giant's ethics policy, which was strict but very much backed by Stonecipher.

And finally, news just in: mobile technology giant Qualcomm, these days one of the 50 biggest US companies by market capitalisation, has appointed Paul Jacobs as its new CEO. The name may sound familiar as Jacobs has been president of that company's Wireless and Internet Group for some time. Or it may just be you know him as junior, the eldest son of founder and now outgoing CEO Irwin Jacobs, the man often referred to as the 'father of CDMA', the technology Qualcomm has pioneered. (We wondered some time ago whether that makes Paul the 'brother of CDMA'.)

You may well ask whether this is nepotism. But most people who know that vendor will point out Paul Jacobs has been groomed for that position for some time and is a more than capable exec. We wonder how the company might change. Plenty of shareholders and customers might hope it doesn't.

So three changes at the top. Must be going around. What they show us, in their own ways, is that it is now both a time for companies to be more vigilant over their chief executives - hence the change at Boeing or the need to make sure keeping the same surname on the biggest office's door isn't frowned upon - and more open to change, hence a foreigner at Sony.

Many would argue that Boeing has at once been overly strict - after all, should governance be stricter than in the ultimate US executive office? - or that it may have other things on its mind. It hasn't exactly had the best of it recently against arch-rival, the Airbus consortium.

Notwithstanding that, finding CEOs that do the job well - in and outside tech - seems to be getting harder and harder.