In search of the next great corporate leaders
EDITOR'S NOTE
We thank CNBC bigshot Dan Colarusso for his commentary today!
There will be no Christmas puns here – no naughties or nices or metaphorical lumps of coal. And don't even get me started on why there's won't be champagne corks popping to welcome 2020.
There's no time for any of that. Even with the Fed on hold, the trade war on pause and President Trump's impeachment hanging over it all, other big answers to big questions started to reveal themselves in recent weeks.
For me, the biggest business story of the year was Boeing. And I may say the same thing on Dec. 26, 2020, too.
This week the board jettisoned CEO Dennis Muilenburg after he spent almost 11 painful months trying to talk around the problems of the 737 Max. The two fatal Max crashes – with a combined death toll of 346 – never posed an existential threat to Boeing, its most ardent supporters in the markets repeated early and often. Axing the CEO was aggressive. Boeing bulls had also been arguing that keeping the CEO was imperative to show a steady hand was guiding the company through the process.
But if the past year has taught us anything, it's that a "steady hand" is open to interpretation. We'll find out over the next 12 months whether 2019 was merely an unusually busy year for CEO departures or a new normal, when shareholders, stakeholder and a hypersonic pace of change put CEOs on a shorter leash than ever. More than 1,400 CEOs have either resigned or been fired in 2019, from companies ranging from Nike to Expedia. Last time the numbers were this high was in the carnage of 2008.
In the case of Boeing, a peek behind the curtain showed cracks in one of the America's industrial crown jewels. Investors and regulators took notice and, looking back on it, Muilenburg may have been cooked two months ago when Dave Calhoun was announced as chairman of the board. Now it's Calhoun's Max mess to fix, something the market seems to think he can do – at least based on how shares traded in the aftermath of the announcement.
The war Calhoun must now win has battles on several different fronts: he must satisfy regulators, he must mollify airlines who buy his planes and he must soothe flyers around the world. None are easy victories in the best of circumstances, but Boeing's many delays may have exhausted the patience of all three audiences.
Boeing carries the additional burden of being a major American jobs creator and stalwart in the global aerospace market. Every move Calhoun makes will be under a microscope. Any big missteps, and he won't only hear from investors, plaintiffs' attorneys and pilots' unions but likely from White House, which has already recommended the company rebrand the Max to ease the minds of nervous flyers.
If all that seems an unenviable, almost unwinnable task, take a look around – tech CEOs are fighting competition and a newly keen interest from Washington; retail CEOs are trying to get the right mix of bricks and clicks to keep costs contained; and industrial giants have to balance geopolitics with changing labor forces and resource constraints.
Boeing is the story of the year because its challenges are uniquely consequential. But it has this in common with those other swaths of corporate America: is anyone really up to the challenge of being one of these big-company CEOs?
In 2020, we'll look to answer that question.
Happy New Year!
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