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| — "An Interview with Nate Bennett & Stephen Miles" ManagementFirst | August 2006 Alistair Craven  Full Article |
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— "CEO and COO Try 'Marriage Counseling'" Chief Executive Jim Clark and Chief Operating Officer Thomas Fumarelli were new to their posts— and each other. They needed to take drastic steps to turn around WaterMark, a struggling maker of kayaks and car racks, but anxious managers were trying to play them off against each other. And the two executives came from very different backgrounds: Mr. Clark, 43 years old, is an avid hunter who has spent his career in sporting goods, while Mr. Fumarelli, 50, is an urbane finance professional who had worked in New York and Paris. To get on the same page, Messrs. Clark and Fumarelli took an unusual step: joint executive-coaching sessions. For 2½ years, the two met together each month with a pair of coaches who helped them sort out their feelings about work and talk through tough decisions, such as whether to relocate the company from isolated Arcata, Calif. "It was like marriage counseling, almost," recalls Mr. Clark, who credits the joint coaching with helping the men through rough patches. "You get all the issues on the table." Messrs. Clark and Fumarelli chose a novel solution to a common problem: miscommunication in the executive suite. A CEO and COO who are out of step can send mixed messages and undermine each other's authority, says Nathan Bennett, a management professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of Riding Shotgun: The Role of the COO. If the CEO and COO "get half a stride out of step, that's going to translate into trouble for the company," says Bennett, who interviewed dozens of executives for his book.... |
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| — "Rockin' Executives: Cheaper than a Ferrari" The Toronto Star, D2 | July 31, 2006 Seconds-in-command are handy, to focus on executing the business plan (a common failure at "visionary" companies), to free up CEOs for their ambassadorial and strategic-thinking roles, and to gain experience as logical replacements for the CEO once he or she retires or stumbles. Yet a U.S. survey in 2002 cited by Nathan Bennett and Stephen Miles, authors of Riding Shotgun: The Role of the COO, found that only 17 per cent of boards replaced the COO after he or she was promoted to the top job. This would help explain the widespread execution failures in the corporate world and the tendency of troubled firms to turn to outsiders, given the paucity of inside candidate - never mind that outsiders typically fare worse than CEOs groomed within the firm. Trouble is, many new CEOs feel threatened by having to share power with a second-in-command - your first warning this may not be a company you want to invest in. Says Mort Tofler, former COO at Dell Inc. and now CEO at investment firm Castletop Capital: "There are some visible recent examples of CEO failure that result from one person trying to do the whole thing. When you travel 70 per cent of the time, that has to lead to periods of indecision and people waiting for a decision. I just think those jobs are too big and complex for any normal human being." |
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| — "A Job for Those who do not need the Limelight" Financial Times | July 25, 2006 Stefan Stern You may not be altogether surprised to learn that a book co-authored by a headhunter discusses at length how and why companies should go about creating the new role of chief operating officer. Never mind the organisational chart, you might say, just count the fees.... Full Article |
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| — "Riding Shotgun: The Role of the COO" ManyWorlds.com | July 11, 2006 Plenty of books focus on the role of the CEO, but surprisingly few home in on their second-in-command, the COO. Nathan Bennett and Stephen Miles—a scholar and a consultant, respectively—draw on first-person accounts from admired COOs to provide new insights into this important position. An essential resource that should help CEOs and COOs to establish a workable leadership structure. Full Article |
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— "The COO: Friend or Foe?" |
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— "Riding Shotgun: The Role of the COO" |
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| — "Monday Morning Manager" globeandmail.com, B2 | May 22, 2006 Harvey Schachter Chief operating officers may be second in command, but the role is ill-defined and companies often go for long periods without even naming one. In Harvard Business Review, Georgia Tech business professor Nathan Bennett and Canadian-born consultant Stephen Miles shed light on this little-understood position by delineating seven kinds of COOs, based on the motivation for appointing them.... Full Article |
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