When is personal
truly personal, and when is it something else?
That may
depend on who's doing the talking. The question came up last week
after Gillette Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer James
Kilts bowed out of the running for the top job at Coca-Cola. People
close to the situation speculated that Mr. Kilts's withdrawal
was motivated by personal reasons. They said he didn't want to
relocate from Rye, N. Y., where his ailing mother-in-law also
lives, and didn't want to be a long-distance commuter to Atlanta,
Coke's headquarters.
Mr. Kilts,
who had been considered Coke directors' leading candidate, declined
to comment. But the speculation about what prompted his decision
has drawn attention to the fact that executives sometimes suggest
they are rejecting a top post because of lifestyle or family concerns
when in fact they just don't want the job.
"Anyone
[like Mr. Kilts] who already is a CEO of a large public company
is constantly on the go, traveling at least 30% or 40% of the
time, and already has had to sacrifice a lot of his personal life,"
says Steve Maber, an executive recruiter at Christian & Timbers.
"So when you hear of a stopper like this, it causes you to
wonder what else is going on."
Others
agree that CEOs rarely opt out of exceptional jobs because they
don't want to relocate their families or commute between home
and corporate headquarters. "As a CEO you have a private
jet that will take you anyplace, anytime, and you also have the
means to move a relative with you and get all the care you need
for them," says Pat Cook, head of Cook & Co., a Bronxville,
N. Y., executive-search boutique. "It's the people down the
ranks with fewer financial resources who have to scrape and sweat
to take care of elderly parents" or children.
When
one of Cook's clients declined a top-executive job a few years
ago, he said he couldn't relocate from the East Coast to the West
Coast because both his children were having emotional crises.
"To this day, I think he magnified the crises," she
says. "Maybe one of his kids was having problems, but it
was also a diplomatic way to withdraw without rejecting the company
that was tapping him or causing me to lose interest in him for
future positions."
It's uncertain
what prompted Mr. Kilts to opt out of the running for the top
Coke job, but any new CEO at the giant soft-drink company will
face difficult management challenges. Mr. Kilts, who formerly
was a CEO at Nabisco, currently commutes between Rye, N. Y., and
Gillette's headquarters in Boston. He has won kudos at Gillette
for tightening inventory controls, launching new advertising campaigns
and boosting profits.
At Coke,
Mr. Kilts, 56 years old, would have to start over again. He would
face the tough
task of getting rid of weak managers, bringing in new talent and
somehow finding a way to re- fresh the brand. He also would face
a potentially meddling board, which includes Donald Keough, the
77-year-old retired Coke president who is heading the search committee.
Two other
prominent executives also opted out of the running to be Coke
CEO last week.
Carlos Gutierrez, chairman and CEO of Kellogg, told Coke directors
he didn't want the job, and Robert Eckert, chairman and CEO of
Mattel, said he planned to remain at the toy maker.
Even CEOs
for whom family and geographical location have been important
criteria when accepting a new position say that those who aspire
to lead companies must put work first. When Dick Brown, the former
CEO of Electronic Data Systems, was recruited to the Plano, Texas,
company in 1998, he was attracted by the chance to return to the
U.S. from London, where he had been heading Cable & Wireless.
"My wife's parents, who lived in New York, weren't well,
and it was hard for her to travel so far to see them," Mr.
Brown says. "I would have preferred a job in the Northeast,
but Dallas was closer to New York than London."
Mr. Brown
also wanted to travel less. Most of Cable & Wireless's operations
were in Asia, and he was logging about 500,000 miles a year.
Prior to
his move to EDS, though, Mr. Brown had relocated his family 18
times to advance his career. "Every time I was asked to move,
I did it," he says. When it comes to advancement, he notes,
"people who aren't willing to make those kinds of personal
tradeoffs aren't on equal footing with those who are."
CEOs who
cite personal reasons for declining a post when they really don't
want the job may have difficulty understanding the problems of
lower-level managers with child-care and elder-care responsibilities.
Betsy Sodergren, vice president of corporate marketing for Clark
Consulting, North Barrington, Ill., left a job as an Allstate
Insurance vice president several years ago when her father had
a stroke and her mother had Alzheimer's. "I needed a company
that would give me time off so I could go to doctor's appointments
with my parents and visit them frequently," she says. She
found this first at Zurich Life and now at Clark, where she supervises
several employees who also need flexible schedules to care for
elderly parents.
