>5.000 CEO's quit in the last 6 weeks
Why Is There a Boom in CEO Resignations?
AUDIO
https://therealnews.com/stories/why-boom-ceo-resignations-management
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://therealnews.com/stories/why-boom-ceo-resignations-management
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Greg Wilpert: It’s the Real News Network. I’m Greg Wilpert in Arlington, Virginia.
In 2019, a record number of 1640 CEOs resigned from major corporations. For January 2020 alone, the number was 219, indicating that CEO departures could reach an even higher number this year. Prominent CEOs to leave or announce their departures in 2020 include the CEOs of Match Group, [inaudible 00:00:28], L Brands, Outdoor Voices, MasterCard, Fastly, Harley Davidson, IBM, T-mobile, LinkedIn, and Disney, among many others. Why are so many CEOs resigning and why has the number been increasing recently?
The reasons seem to vary. Some analysts talk about a management restructuring, some say it’s because of a failure to meet the company’s goals, others definitely have stepped down because of sexual harassment scandals or because of a failure to address sexual misconduct within their companies. But it cannot be necessarily a coincidence that CEOs are departing at an increasing rate. The trend calls for an analysis of what is going on, for which we have our guests Bill Black today.
Bill is a white collar criminologist, former financial regulator, and associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He’s also the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Thanks for joining us again, Bill.
Bill Black: Thank you.
Greg Wilpert: So, Fortune Magazine says that the reason for the record number of CEO resignations is the MeToo movement because so many CEOs got entangled in scandals over sexual misconduct, either themselves, or for turning a blind eye to what was happening in their own companies. Do you agree with that analysis?
Bill Black: No, but that is a contributor. It is actually one of the remarkable changes in the last several years that one of the best ways for really powerful CEOs to lose their job is to have what used to be described as a consensual sexual relationship with a subordinate.
Greg Wilpert: So one of the things that’s happened is that CEO compensation skyrocketed during the second half of the 20th century and has only continued to accelerate since then. Some sociologists and economists have even argued that the economy entered a managerial revolution in the 1940s and 50s and that we are now in what could be called managerial capitalism, where managers constitute the new ruling class instead of the owners of companies [inaudible 00:02:30]. Would you agree with that? And if so, what does such a high CEO turnover mean for how the upper echelons of our society is run?
Bill Black: Okay, so to do the super brief version of this, we had the rise first of the robber barons, as they were called. These were individuals that not only ran their own companies, they ran all the competitive companies, and the reason we call it antitrust is that there were trust agreements drawn up by the lawyers that facilitated this, that gave one person effective power over all the seeming competitors. So those were the bigger than life entrepreneurs who, you know, literally said money was something you should throw off the back of trains, and were notorious….
''Cont at url'