What happens after big-name CEOs leave their jobs? Do their reputations recover over time if they are fired or leave under pressure? How should they re-enter the public dialogue? The ousting of GM’s long-time leader Rick Wagoner brings the question to mind, along with Monday’s Bloomberg TV interview of former HP CEO Carly Fiorina. (Both Fiorina and Meg Whitman, former EBay CEO who was not fired but chose to step down, have clear political ambitions, perhaps proving that government is the glamour industry for the next 30 years, as technology and finance were for the past 30.)
The personal visibility gained by high profile CEOs can be a blessing and a curse when they choose to re-enter the limelight. Ms. Fiorina was somewhat more polished than she appeared at the end of her HP reign, and she seemed to have been aggressively media trained for her current appearances. She gave a very controlled interview salted with crisply delivered Republican Party economic and policy messages.
But, the personal and professional sometimes collide in the interaction between the media and business leaders, and no matter how much time former CEOs have spent being interviewed, politicians tend to have more experience blending their private and public lives. Asked what she thought of the Obama approach to healthcare reform, Ms Fiorina gave the expected party-policy answer. Then the reporter closed the interview with a somewhat abrupt question about her late-February cancer diagnosis, which most viewers probably didn’t know about. That seemed to surprise the ex HP leader, who then clicked back to factual mode and gave a one sentence synopsis of her treatment plan. It could have been the opportunity to make a connection on a human level, to say something that linked her views on health care policy to her own situation and to that of people who don’t have the level of healthcare she can access. But she didn’t make the connection. Whether due to editing or lack of follow through, the reporter also missed the chance to circle back from the personal to the policy issue.
A very different example of how the personal and professional are impossible to separate for visible leaders comes from the reemergence of another, this one fallen due to a moral failure rather than loss of corporate confidence. Ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer moved further along his own attempted arc of redemption, with an interesting piece in the March 30 edition of Newsweek. His opinions were offered as part of a package of columns on populist rage (a subject he knows well from personal experience as a crusader against compliance failures on Wall Street, and later as a target for his own criminal activities.) He begins by asserting that anger-fed populism is not a good public policy compass and that “public rage – generated by the catastrophic risk taking of many Wall Street traders–is fanned by Washington legislators desperate to make up for their own decade of neglect.” That’s the ultimate “takes one to know one” statement from a former catastrophic risk taker of a different kind, who, in hindsight, often seemed desperate to make up for something. But given his personal history, the way he ends his piece is perhaps more telling than he intended: “What we need to restore to the Washington debate is logic, not anger; principles not wrath.” His experience might only have been on the state level, but when it comes to the impact of public anger and wrath, he — perhaps unintentionally–reminds us that he is an expert.
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Eliot Spitzer’s re-entry into the mainstream continued this week in a substantive one-on-one interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show. Although there was requisite treatment of the pathos of his personal situation, the heart of the interview gave Mr. Spitzer a platform to continue to weigh in on AIG, the current populist-tinged focus on bonuses and executive pay and the pressures on financial institutions. As an early and tenacious reformer, Spitzer is parlaying a combination of relevant expertise and a sense that he provides unique perspective. (His now “fresh” voice is strengthened by the dearth of political leaders who can speak firmly without having to explain their prior lack of attention to the growing risks in the financial markets.) This distinctive professional credibility appears to fill a need in the public discourse that is enabling Spitzer to re-engage, continuing to express his contrition about his personal life while reminding viewers and readers of the qualities and acumen that made him a successful prosecutor and political leader for so long. Spitzer may be one of the few to benefit from the turmoil in the financial community. And we certainly will hear more from him as this unusual reputation rebuilding process continues.