The longtime company boss was unsentimentally thrown out of the assortment like the unsalable T-shirts after the season change. Gap's board thanked Art Peck for "its multiple contributions," the company said last week. The fashion chain has made "progress" during its 15-year tenure. Two cool sentences for one and a half decades.
Peck is not the only top manager the sacking has caught bang on case. A few days earlier, his McDonald's colleague Steve Easterbrook had meekly said goodbye. According to the official version, Easterbrook had to go because he had a relationship with a colleague and thus violated internal rules.
Mark Lennihan / AP / DPA
Art Peck, ex-CEO of Gap (stock image from 2015)
Some observers initially suspected that this was just an excuse to get rid of the 52-year-old manager. It could not have come to the point that love in America's company was prohibited, marveled a stunned Fox presenter. But in the days of the MeToo debate, McDonald's was obviously too explosive. It is usually complained about the fact that supervisory boards acted too hesitantly, praises the management expert Ryan Patel of the Drucker School of Management: "Here they have moved at a high speed."
REUTERS / Shannon Stapleton / File Photo
Ex-McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook (on an archive image from 2016)
Not just in the case of McDonald's
- The career of Kevin Burns at e-cigarette maker Juul came to an equally sudden end
- like Devin Wenig's on Ebay.
- The CEO of online bargain retailer Overstock, Patrick Byrne, who had an affair with a Russian spy, resigned after two decades.
- Under Armor CEO and founder Kevin Plank also cleared his chair.
- The dazzling Wework boss Adam Neumann, who considered himself so indispensable that the office space provider had listed a possible departure of its founder in the prospectus as a risk factor for the business, was complemented with a golden handshake.
And so on.
172 company bosses have gone alone in October - record
As different as the reasons for the departures are in detail, a trend can be seen: The threshold for companies to get rid of problems of the inmates of corner offices on the top floor, has fallen. 172 business leaders have given up the calculation of career counseling firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in October alone in its post - a record. Challenger, which helps executives killed as so-called outplacement agencies, also includes foundations and authorities. Even in the 2008 financial crisis, staff turnover was not as high as in recent months, says Vice President Andrew Challenger.
The recent hectic coming and going on the top floor is not a purely American phenomenon. According to a study by consulting firm PwC, 17.5 percent of bosses in the world's 2,500 biggest companies were replaced last year, more than ever before. While a CEO could once count on keeping at least eight years on the job, today there are only five. Sometimes the patience span is even shorter. For 17 years, Jeffrey Immelt led the industrial group GE. His successor John Flannery came only 14 months. The toy manufacturer Mattel has replaced its CEO three times since 2015.
Expensive departures
The logic of activist investors is: who does not deliver, flies. At the same time, the readiness of the supervisory bodies to tolerate social misconduct is decreasing. "CEOs today are more likely to be held accountable for their personal behavior," believes career adviser Challenger. According to PwC, for the first time in 2018 more CEOs had to go for ethical missteps than for poor financial results. Among them, PwC scandals, sexual relations, frauds but also environmental disasters. Bosses are not only liable for their own negligence, but also for their employees.
"The board members are far less patient than in the past," said Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania, the Washington Post. "The directors ask themselves: Do we have the right CEO to survive the coming storms? And more and more often they answer the question with no."
In business, the motto "The little one hangs, the big ones are allowed to run" seems to have become obsolete. One difference remains: if the boss has to leave, it will be expensive for the company. The farewell lunch package donated to McDonald's outgoing boss, Easterbrook, is worth nearly $ 42 million, according to analyst Equilar.