Aim low, lefty, they're ridin' Shetlands!

Highly Visible CEOs Make Good Targets in the '90s

A CEO with a healthy ego can be a PR manager's fondest dream or worst nightmare. These days, it's apt to be the latter.

A shy and retiring CEO can make it pretty tough to score points with the audiences you're trying to reach and motivate, but one who sticks his neck out presents different sorts of problems in today's ready, fire, aim media environment.

Business conditions - especially in North America - generally are good, but cross-currents in the choppy business/regulatory/media waters could be signaling a sea change. For example:

* While mergers and acquisitions continue apace, so do antitrust hearings and actions against Microsoft, Intel, and others.

* Of course, volumes will be written about the most visible U.S. leader of all and his year-long problems with the media and Monica Lewinsky.

* Even something as seemingly bulletproof as contributing U.S. $20 million to the Olympic Games can jump up and bite you, as David D'Alessandro, highly visible president of John Hancock Insurance discovered when a bribery scandal and subsequent International Olympic Committee resignations caused him to withdraw his company's support. "Whenever you...put your products in the spotlight, you're taking a huge risk," said D'Alessandro. When you do it during the Olympics, you are standing on stage in your boxer shorts in front of the world. "The opportunity is there to seriously embarrass your brand," he said, as reported by ABCNEWS.com.

* Anita Roddick, co-founder of The Body Shop, recently found that the bully pulpit of commerce can be a vulnerable place when a British politician accused her of selling "dope on a rope." Conservative Parliament Minister Tony May accused the highly visible Roddick of being soft on drugs because a new line of skin creams incorporates hemp as an ingredient. Roddick waged an equally high profile defense, saying that the mature Ms. May would benefit from use of the wrinkle cream, as reported in The Guardian.

* And what CEO can't feel the pain of Chainsaw Al Dunlap, author of the downsizing field manual "Mean Business." He put himself out there as the butt-kicking CEO of Sunbeam Corporation until the board of directors took a-page from his book and conducted Dunlap's own highly visible public firing.

What CEO surveying this slaughter from the quiet of his corner office is going to think "Gee, I think I'll hang a piece of raw meat around my neck and go dance with the media dogs"?

In the old days - back in the '80s - being a highly visible CEO was fun. Lee Iacocca was smiling center stage at every event - at the side of presidents and movie stars. Even when Chrysler got caught rolling back odometers, Iacocca simply got up and said he was sorry, and the public loved him all the more.

Excess was in, too much was not enough, and that sentiment carried over to high-level media coverage as well. But we all know times have changed. And in these waning months of the '90s, no one is making headway championing highly public causes.

Highly Visible CEO Styles Compared

In the wake of the mass layoffs of the late 1980s and early '90s, CEOs began their retreat from the limelight. Employees who remained on payrolls became the corporate central focus. After all, with work forces at sometimes half their previous strengths, customer service dropped off the cliff, while as a concern for management it jumped to issue No. 1.

Earlier layoffs, coupled with management attitudes that favored shareholders over employees, came home to roost in the late '90s. Employee loyalty was pretty much consigned to history. Labor - especially highly skilled workers - defected at will. Labor strife mounted.

Two airlines - American and Southwest - and their CEOs typify the differences in the two decades. Bob Crandall took a highly visible and sometimes unpopular position beginning in 1985 as head spokesman of a major and faltering airline, American Airlines. He was a strong leader and became personified as AMR in the public mind until he retired in 1998. His parting shot was a proposal to make it illegal for pilots to strike.

By comparison, Herb Kelleher, CEO at Southwest Airlines, has made a highly visible career out of praising his employees. In an April 1998 interview on Cable News Network, Kelleher said, "First, employees are number one. The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers.... At Southwest Airlines, each employee does the work of three." Asked what keeps him motivated after 25 years, Kelleher says, "The people. They have the hearts of lions, the strength of elephants and the determination of water buffaloes....We receive thousands of letters a year from customers commending employees for driving two hours to drop off luggage, or for buying lunch for someone who was stranded at the airport."

Kelleher's shirtsleeve, keep-'em-laughing approach has helped keep Southwest growing and its employees performing legendary customer service accomplishments. Meanwhile, and by contrast, at this writing, American Airlines pilots were defying a court order and battling management through a sick-out that stranded many thousands of passengers.

Bill Gates: Just the Omnipotent Billionaire Next Door

Replacing high-profile posturing of the '80s is the more self-effacing CEO style of today, a la Kelleher, or even the usually shy and retiring Bill Gates. The glare of the antitrust hearings, of course, puts Gates in a different, more intense light. Otherwise, for the world's richest man, he doesn't cut much of a public figure.

It is, in fact, ironic that the man who has more electronic media at his disposal than any other chooses to speak to me through his "Ask Bill" column in my daily newspaper. In the February 11, 1999, edition of The Palm Springs Desert Sun, the lead-off question for Mr. Bill was: "Is there life on other planets?" Now, even my dentist knows this kind of column material is produced by Gates's staff and distributed to newspaper editors. That means his staff is positioning him as a credible authority on whether or not there's life on other planets. But why? What's the logic thread here - that a guy with more money than Micronesia has some secret pipeline to information about life on Mars?

The column's next question was: "Do you have any pets?" I half expected him to say: "Yes, I have a pet Ooboka, a spotted Venusian lizard."

By the way, he modestly admitted that he didn't know it there is life on other planets, and no, he doesn't have any pets.

So Bill Gates's PR machine cranks away using both 18th- and 21st-century tools to burnish an image of this enigmatic man, at once omniscient enough to be asked if there's life on other planets, yet approachable enough to be asked in the next breath if he has any pets.

Of course, all this plays out against the daily backdrop of the antitrust hearings in Washington, where lawyers for and against portray him alternately as controller and victim, genius and boob, free-market entrepreneur, and monopolist.

Internet Visibility Cuts Two Ways

The Internet can instantly ramp up the celebrity level of a high profile '90s player by some 30 million (or whatever) participants. But, of course, the downside is you're just as apt to have that many people asking embarrassing questions of you online, or offering anecdotes of you as a dope-smoking high school bully or other observations you'd just as soon not have as part of your public persona. Forget it - celebrity Internet-style is instantly interactive, and bad news can travel faster than good.

The Internet-with-training-wheels approach is being used by CEOs such as John Chambers, president and CEO at Cisco Systems, Inc. He appears as "Guest CEO Columnist" in American Electronics Association's online newsletter (January/February). Although this is certainly safer than some real-time online free-for-all, it also greatly diminishes the potential star power impact.

So these are watershed times. The broad brush of historical perspective shows us that CEO visibility rises and falls over time. In the '60s and '70s, with consumerism in full rage and business - along with most other institutions - under attack, CEOs took a lower profile. In the '80s CEOs and business came to the fore. The '90s have seen a quieting, occasioned at least in part by issues such as CEO compensation, which many have declined to confront publicly or head-on.

What's ahead is anybody's guess. But the prudent strategist would say it's generally safest not to buck the tide. If you insist on riding headlong into battle, the best advice might be: Keep your head down and ride a short horse.

Cliff McGoon is a business writer with offices in Palm Springs and San Francisco.