CITY AND SUBURBAN
Go ahead and shoot the chairman: that's what he's for
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Poor Peter Laister. It is bad enough to be shot on your own quarterdeck at Thorn EMI, but to find that the news of your execution has encouraged your share price — that is humiliating. In part, that re- sponse was the fund managers' crow of triumph over a chairman who had become their butt. More, it implied that with Mr Laister out of the way Thorn could be open to a bid or a break-up. A plainer message came from Sir Graham Wilkins, who com- manded the firing squad and has now hoisted his own flag. 'If you're chairman and chief executive,' said Sir Graham, 'we all know where the buck stops.' Do we indeed? Certainly we all know of chairmen and chief executives whose confidence and competence are those which Sydney Smith imputed to Lord John Russell: 'I believe he would perform the operation for the stone, build St Peter's, or assume (with or without ten minutes' notice) the command of the Channel Fleet; and no one would discover by his manner that the patient had died, the church tumbled down, and the Channel Fleet had been knocked to atoms.' They go breezily on, leaving their trails of wreckage behind them. It can take a bid to expel them, and even then they recur, high in the councils of the CBI, or the boards of banks. Too many directors find it too easy to sack hundreds of people whom they have never met, rather than one man they know and quite like. Yes, they say, but it's a bit hard on him, he hasn't long to go, it wasn't really his fault . . . . The hundreds out of work may reasonably say that it really wasn't their fault, either, even if their contracts were cheaper to break. Chairmen now claim to be paying them- selves by results, and with company profits rising strongly their salaries have risen as fast — with second-rate chairmen of second-rate outfits being paid in six fig- ures, plus pension, car, and all the rest of it. Fine, so long as they will be fired by results. I take no pleasure in Mr Laister's fate, but I hope that his execution will encourage the others.
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