The biz journal has a little piece on a survey by Robbert Half of reasons why people leave jobs.  Turns out that unhappiness with managers tops the list.  (Beautiful headline writing, incidentally.) Not terribly surprising.  If one's "excellent employees" are leaving isn't that an indication of an issue of some sort in their management? 
Unless, I supose, one's strategy is to be what the old Heidrick folks used to call an Academy Company, one whose biggest product is executives for other companies.

Seagate shows us what happens when succession planning goes awry.  The board apparently lost both the CEO and the COO in this contretemps.  Oops, now one of them has to step in.  Given the situation they are in, with no CEO and no COO they are lucky to have a former CEO on the board to take the reins, but that's not a practice I'd have reccomended.  A year on the board to facilitate the transition makes some sense, but after that former CEOs should go find other boards to be on.  I certainly wouldn't have wanted such a person joggling my elbow four years later.  Anyway, I certainly don't know what went on between Bill Watkins and his board that led to this, but Dave Wickersham did absolutely the right thing.  If you are a COO, and your CEO is gone, and they are not showing you into his office, you might as well leave now because it is only a matter of time.  Painful and awkward time. 


In one other note, if you were choosing somebody to manage Seagate through this market, (and absent any data about particular people's actual strategies)  would it be the Investment Banker-cum-Corp Dev Guy or the Operations Guy's Operations Guy? 

Borders has a new CEO.  His background seems surprisingly well suited to the job considering he'd just been sitting on the board there ready to jump in.  It seems a bit of an odd time for a switch as their 11.7% drop in holiday sales is right in line with other retailers and according to the Chairman the company is doing everything right, just needing to do it faster and better.  Perhaps the recent shelving of plans to sell the company is the key sentence in that story.