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The issue of a CEO becoming president is important because the job requires a high order of leadership and problem-solving ability. The critical issue is that when a CEO tries to help the public, the first question asked in most labor/nonprofessional communities is whether you are a Republican or a Democrat.
Former Wisconsin Gov. Lee Dreyfus was a CEO at Sentry Insurance and chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Like Ronald Reagan, he demonstrated that social good can be created by someone on the other side of the political aisle.
As education improves, people are less inclined to make single-issue judgments as they once did. However, the vestiges of the old backroom politics continue to discourage professionals and CEOs from running for political office.
I am a Progressive Republican, and I have paid for that in the 1980s in Kenosha with nails in car tires and nails in a car radiator. Since the 1990s, attitudes are changing, but in some ways, it is like the old Second City joke about two Eastern European immigrants, "Comrade, America is just like home, except you only vote Democrat..."
For a professional or CEO to run for president, he or she must transcend the notion that a president of all the people has to be Democrat and cease pandering to special interest groups that profess to speak for the "people." Gov. Dreyfus [who signed the state's first gay rights law] took no PAC money at all, preferring to accept individual contributions of $5 or less. Until public education is restored to better levels, the best that CEOs can do is to improve the public school system by supporting the voucher system and voucher housing system so that people are "Free to Choose," to borrow Milton Friedman's phrase.
David Kanecki
CEO
Kanecki Associates
Kenosha, WI
CEO Severance
Severance compensation has moved too far away from its original intent-first, to cover the vested "value" an executive gives up in order to take a new job, and second, to provide protection through compensation to an executive while he/she found a new job in the event he/she were fired "without cause." The "firing" cost normally covered two to three years of compensation, which provided a cushion of time (protection) to the executive plus some penalty to the board for firing a senior executive without a good reason. But the amount of this compensation decreased over time as the risk to the executive decreased. Severance compensation was never meant to enrich an executive who performed poorly.
Jon Crystal
Houston,TX
Converting Vision Into Action
I couldn't agree more with Bob Donnelly's "Converting CEO Vision Into Action" (The Entrepreneurial CEO). Too many CEOs focus on the surface of corporate management, which includes an abnormal focus on topline revenues and profits. His approach to focusing on how management teams think as opposed to what they do is refreshing. Our firm believes strongly in the same philosophy.
David Woods
CEO
Giant Partners
Oklahoma City, OK  | 
