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The Life Cycle of a CEO— Claudius A. Hildebrand & Robert J. Stark

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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.

Improving the performance of companies that are performing fairly well is now the predominant objective, and PE firms have learned that a CEO’s people leadership abilities are the vital complement to strength in finance and operations for this new frontier of performance improvement.

Notes

Chapter Four: Reinvention

1. Rose Gailey, Ian Johnston, and Andre LeSueur, “Aligning Culture with the Bottom Line: How Companies Can Accelerate Progress,” Hedrick & Struggles, www.heidrick.com/en/insights/culture-shaping/aligning-culture-eith-the-bottom-line-how-companies-can-accelerate-progress#RefN2

1. Nigel Travis, The Challenge Culture, Kindle ed. (New York: PublicAffairs,2018), 34.

1. John Antioco, “How I Did It: Blockbuster’s Former CEO on Sparring with an Activist Shareholder,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/04/how-i-did-it-blockbusters-former-ceo-on-sparring-with-an-activist-shareholder.