July | 2012 | CorporateIntel

I aspire in this post to be among the elite—one of the few business bloggers on the planet currently not commenting on Marissa Mayer becoming CEO of Yahoo. I have never met Marissa, but her reputation speaks strongly for her. I wish her well because I always want good people to succeed, and in this case I also want to see Yahoo succeed. I hope she reads my article about Yahoo from last year that predated her last two predecessors and figures out a way to restore much-needed competition to the landscape of search. Hmm, seems I’m writing about her. Okay, enough said. Got get ’em, Yahoo! Stop.

Now my real topic for the week—not surprisingly, also about succession.

Venture investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have been steadfast in their support for keeping Founder/CEOs at the helm of the companies they back, from early blog posts on their site that state their philosophy to more recent comments in the Wall Street Journal that reinforce their sometimes contrarian assertions. Not only do they believe most deeply in the Founder/CEO success model, they have championed multiple class shares that keep CEOs in authority with majority control even without majority ownership. Their point of view is clear, consistent, and well-argued—and thus far their financial returns in aggregate have been extraordinary. They want vision, they want independence and long-term creative thinking, and they want continuity.

I am not sure I have an absolute opinion yet on absolute power for a start-up CEO; we’ll have to see how those play out over the next ten or twenty years. I do worry that without senior team loyalty and continuity, it may not matter whether a CEO stays or goes. Teamwork is what matters in today’s intellectual property centric companies, and if your team is not stable, I wonder if your company can remain so. Surely new blood is a great infusion when parsed appropriately, but it needs to be in balance, at equilibrium with a set of players we can count on.

What about the top-tier executives, perhaps a level down, who seem to jump freely from ship to ship, following their own personal muses, particularly after liquidity gives them the ability to set themselves free? Is this good for companies and long-term shareholder value, for companies with massive capitalization that are taking on investment—public or private—ostensibly with some hope of being Built to Last?

Clearly within our pressured and fragile economy, the bonding relationships between employers and employees have become increasingly tenuous. “At-will employment” is not just boilerplate in an offer letter, it means what it says, that jobs are temporal. Employees not under contract may depart a gig when they wish without much obligation, and employers may equally freely dismiss them (to the extent those decisions are not discriminatory) without much warning or explanation. Companies are predisposed to protect earnings and cost-cutting can be a tactic to achieve those goals, the favor of which gives employees good reason to always be in the market. Although there are any number of topics I can extract from that thread and will do so in the future, that is not my key focus here. This is not about everyday turnover and the anxiety it creates, it is about senior level turnover as a litmus test for investors.

Reality is, a lot of high-profile employees in high-profile start-ups seem to jump ship early these days. I am not so sure that they are cashing in as much as their attention spans or personal desires lead them from one thing to the next. Some examples:

• Two of Twitter’s co-founders who served as CEO left the job and their day-to-day roles, although one returned, not as CEO, but as head of product. The third co-Founder also left day-to-day responsibilities.

• Facebook’s most recent CTO, who joined the company in 2008, departed voluntarily almost immediately following the IPO. Facebook also lost an extremely high-profile CFO in 2009, and a number of other prominent C-level executives have churned through in the years leading up to the IPO.

• Groupon’s former COO, a Silicon Valley veteran brought in to steady the ship, spent about a year on the job day-to-day before moving to an advisory role.

• Yahoo continues to make headlines with five CEOs in five years, although the situation here is different. The last one to leave on his own timeline was media veteran Terry Semel, who preceded the five. Perhaps more curious at Yahoo is the level below CEO, where the turnover has been even more active, voluntary or otherwise.

• Google is now being celebrated as iCEO University, for which it has reason to be proud with strong executives like Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Armstrong, Dick Costolo, and now Marissa Mayer all willingly accepting significant challenges. My sense is this is sustainable as long as founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stay on the job (guided by the advice of Eric Schmidt), but at some point the spinning off of entrepreneurs may take a toll as it did at once great legendary giants like Sun and Silicon Graphics (also keep an eye on HP).

It is hard to fault someone with talent and wealth for leaving a position with an “old company” to tackle a brand new start-up concept. They have the creativity, they have the yearning, and they can absorb the personal risk. Yet these aren’t exactly old, mature companies they are leaving, even in internet time. If talent retention is critical to continuity and leadership is demonstrated by example, what does it say about loyalty to the “rank and file” millionaires of Silicon Valley hungry to pursue their dreams when so many of the top dogs or near top dogs are endemically antsy?

Can you build a company that is Built to Last when many of your brightest employees—especially those made wealthy with capital they can reinvest—are thinking Built to Jump? Should shareholders in emerging high-valuation private and public companies be concerned with the New World of high turnover that is largely viewed as the way things are? There is already risk enough in holding stakes at the high valuations these companies will need to grow into, but if these are essentially knowledge-based companies where the key assets go home to their families each night, how much should owners worry whether they come back tomorrow or start a new company that’s more fun? Are these companies Built to Last or Built to Launch—launch themselves to early prominence, and launch the careers of the stars who emerge from their ranks?

Retention and the war for talent are surely talked about a lot, but I wonder if these are just buzzwords now, if key stakeholders really are losing sleep over the next spun-off employee or just prepared to roll with the punches. For anyone who has ever led a company, the notion of culture is no small issue, and companies where the culture is strong have a heritage of continuity that gives them a shot at longevity. Do we now assume Creative Destruction is such a powerful force that short-lived companies are a norm, regardless of culture and continuity? I wonder, and look forward to checking the Fortune 500 again for a few more decades to see how this plays out—not to mention the long-term trend on aggregate net job creation we so desperately need for our economy to go the distance.

I am not suggesting that employees should stay past their welcome or interest level, and in no way would I ever want (or tolerate as a manager) any form of stagnation in the form of tenure-based retention or retention for continuity’s sake. The case I am trying to make is for a tiny bit of balance in an Old World concept known as loyalty—which has been very good to me on both sides of the desk for most of my years on the job. It has been said that in today’s world loyalty is between individuals, not within companies, and there is every reason to understand how that has come to be. Yet if companies are not loyal to employees and employees are not loyal to companies, can these kind of companies really be long-term investments for shareholders? Said another way, if the system and talent are not demonstrating loyalty and commitment, should investors?

I have been agonizing for weeks whether to write about Rielle Hunter. The notion of a single additional millisecond consumed by the public on this media danse macabre peels the skin from my typing fingers. Still I need to share a few words, less about what’s happened, more about how troubled I am with our inability to look away from the body.

Rielle Hunter is not a celebrity, except that she is. She had a sexual relationship with a married man. She got pregnant. She chose to have a baby. In all sanity, it ends there. Give the child the slimmest chance at a sane life. Be with the child’s father, don’t be with the child’s father, just go away quietly and be a good mom. How hard is that?

Apparently it’s hard because there’s money at stake. As fate would have it, the father of her child was once a party primary candidate for President of the United States, and then the ticket’s Vice Presidential candidate in a national election. How about that. His wife happened to have cancer at the time of both the election and the affair. Now she has passed away. He happened to try to hide the affair from his wife and may have crossed a few lines in doing so, enough to get him hauled into court and tried, although not convicted. Okay, it has to end there. Give the child a shot at any kind of normal life. Preserve any fragment of dignity left for mom and dad. Separate your private life from public spectacle, at least so the public does not have to disgrace itself.

Nope, there’s real money at stake. She cannot help herself, she is cashing in. We are letting her cash in. She didn’t take her fifteen minutes of fame, we are giving it to her. We cannot seem to help ourselves any more than she can.

I am not reading the book. I am not watching the television interviews. Ms. Hunter has nothing important to say, not a word of value will cross her lips. Yet I can’t miss her, she’s everywhere. Why does anyone care? Why do we feed Piers Morgan’s hunger for this flavor of anesthesia by subscribing to it?

It’s supply and demand, free-market capitalism, 100% free speech, no law against it. Nope, don’t want to regulate it. Nope, don’t want to restrict it. Completely agree.

It’s still icky.

Criticize me if you wish for condemning a book I have not read, but if this is a book, we have forgotten what it means to read. There are an infinite number of interesting topics to ponder and curious events to discuss — the mending of our nation’s polarization, Europe’s seesaw economic outlook, interest rate fixing scandals, Wall Street arbitrage incinerating millions of dollars on derivative trades, heartening private sector innovation at wondrous new companies like SpaceX, lower gas prices for summer, a new Aaron Sorkin show on HBO, and a new novel by Kurt Andersen.

In 1992 Roger Waters produced his last solo album called Amused to Death, inspired by Neil Postman’s 1985 landmark book about the grinding impact of media on our critical thinking abilities. It was dark, even for Roger, and it didn’t do too well. It was about a monkey watching TV, just changing the channels on the TV, over and over, through an invasion of our planet by other-worldly creatures observing our demise, until the apocalyptic concluding refrain, “This species has amused itself to death.” Both Postman’s book and Waters’ album preceded the commercial internet, and their observations were anything but unique. But when I saw Rielle Hunter on her book cover staring at me from a display shelf, suggesting there could be any reason for me to buy and read her transcribed words, all I could hear was that refrain: This Species Has Amused Itself to Death.

Well, we’re still here, so not yet, right? We can pay attention to more important things if we want, no shortage of free will to be entertained. We all have our own ideas about what’s relevant. News. Politics. Music. Family. Sports. Pets. Who’s to judge? Does it matter that Entertainment Tonight fills a full hour following every 23 with fluff we used to dismiss as tabloid? Is there any way that hour could be better used, perhaps to learn the name of a local candidate running for State Assembly or why Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice? Maybe not, but it’s bugging me, mostly because I once campaigned for John Edwards and believed he could have been a decent Vice President and/or President of the United States. Now I feel ashamed — ashamed that I was ever on this bandwagon, ashamed that I was duped by lies, ashamed that he denied a child he fathered and can’t take that back, ashamed that we are still paying attention to the mother of that child. I don’t like the way this feels, and I want it somehow, at some level, to stop. That’s my problem.

This one notches beyond tabloid, because the clever maestro Ms. Hunter has made an active choice to compose opportunistically despite the requisite price. She is fully aware of the stakes, the trade, the auction, and the orchestrated bait. Still this compromise of judgment is not Rielle Hunter’s problem. It’s not John Edwards’ problem. This is our problem. I am picking on them to make a point, an egregious case that is emblematic of serial apathy. If we can’t help ourselves and just keep gobbling up this gunk, then in an amiable daze we hand wealth to those who least deserve it, financial reward for nothing earned, nourishing amusement an abandoned aspiration. Our thoughts turn to mush, and there we sit on the cold floor tile, trapped again in a Waters’ refrain, banging our hearts against The Wall until we are Comfortably Numb.

This species can do so much better than that. Really, we can.