Chapter Five: Complacency Trap
- John Clarke, “A Twenty-First-Century Shipwreck,” New Yorker, December 10, 2014, www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/twenty-first-century-shipwreck.
Related Quotes
—
The Life Cycle of a CEO— Claudius A. Hildebrand & Robert J. Stark
—
Introduction
In fact, Dave hadn’t been the first choice for the CEO position, or even the second or third choice. Word was five others had been offered the job before him. What’s more, a couple of years earlier he’d been unceremoniously fired from his position as divisional president at a leading competitor. No one would have suggested from his educational background, either, that he was CEO material. Not only did he not have a degree from an elite school, but it also took him six years to graduate. He hated college and he’d dropped out for a time.
As Dave’s first year in the CEO seat progressed, the sneering assessments of that Florida night prevailed on the Street; the company’s stock slid 40 percent.
5. Complacency Trap
Shortly after sunset on November 29, 2014, the sixty-five-foot sailing sloop Vestas Wind was speeding through the choppy waters of the Indian Ocean, 268 miles from the nearest coast, that of the island of Mauritius.
When CEOs depart during the Complacency Trap stage of the life cycle, generally from years six to ten, inefficiencies that have crept into the organization and problems that have been festering— such as an underperforming unit or product line— constitute much of the low-hanging fruit their successors immediately go after. This invites the question: If those problems are so apparent to new leaders and boards that appoint them, why haven’t they been more effectively addressed?
As former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote in his influential book Only the Paranoid Survive, “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.” CEOs who make it to the Complacency Trap stage have navigated the rough-and-tumble of the Launch, Calibration, and Reinvention stages of the first few years. One unintended consequence of leading their firms adroitly can be an overly assured attitude about the course they’ve set and the organizational improvements they’ve made.
- Nigel Travis, The Challenge Culture, Kindle ed. (New York: PublicAffairs,2018), 34.