聯席CEO大多以失敗告終 甲骨文這次會成爲例外嗎

Leave it to Larry Ellison to appoint two successors.
The founder of software giant Oracle is known for a lifestyle that seems to abide by the more-is-more mantra. With an estimated personal wealth of $46 billion, Ellison has built a sprawling Japanese-style home in Silicon Valley, purchased enviable property in Malibu, sponsored last year’s America’s Cup champion, and two years ago bought an entire Hawaiian island.
His succession announcement on Thursday appears to be yet another case of excess.
Ellison appointed not one but two people to fill his shoes. Co-presidents Mark Hurd, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who joined Oracle in 2010, and the company’s longtime chief financial officer Safra Catz got the nod to split the role held by the 70-year-old tech mastermind.
Oracle will become the fourth Fortune 500 to have two CEOs, joining a group that currently includes American Financial Group, KKR, and Whole Foods. In the last 25 years, only 21 companies in the Fortune 500 have used the co-CEO structure. (There are, of course, companies with smaller revenue that have adopted the dual-CEO approach.) Oracle—No. 82 on this year’s list—will be the 22nd.
The dual-leader setup is rare for a reason.
It “causes conflict,” results in “negative performance by teams,” and gives the two leaders “hostile mindsets,” according to Lindred Greer, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Oh, is that all?
“When you have power, it becomes how you see yourself. And once you have that position, you’re sensitive to threats that might jeopardize it,” says Greer, whose research focuses on team power struggles. One such potential threat? A co-CEO, with the same title and responsibilities.
Not all of these arrangements have been total nightmares, but it’s safe to say that many of them have, at the very least, flirted with complete disaster.
When Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia introduced a co-CEO structure in July 2008 with Wenda Millard and Robin Marino, its chairman Charles Koppelman explained the strategy by saying, “One plus one equals three.” Less than a year later, the “one-plus-one” strategy turned out to be a loser. Millard left after the company lost $15.7 million in 2008. “There was tension,” Koppelman said after Millard’s departure.
Sandy Weill and John Reed, co-CEOs at Citigroup from 1998 to 2000, clashed, says Lawrence Hrebiniak, professor emeritus of management at Wharton, since they were both “strong people with strong views” when it came to determining the company’s direction. “In that case, the duality didn’t really do them very good.”
At SAP, Jim Snabe and Bill McDermott ran the company jointly for three-and-a-half years when it spent more than $14 billion on acquisitions and saw the company’s stock price increase by 70%. The company also lost ground to cloud specialist during that same timeframe. Snabe ceded power to his counterpart in 2013, citing the need to “begin the next phase of my career, closer to my family.”
Chipotle is run by two executives, Steve Ells and Monty Moran, and it’s been one of the few stars of the restaurant world of late. But its leadership—specifically the cost of operating under two CEOs—drew scrutiny in May when 77% of shareholders voted against its executive pay plan.
Publicis and Omnicom pulled the plug on a merger that would have created the world’s largest advertising company in large part because of a clash of CEO egos.
And then there are other times, when co-CEOs operate relatively seamlessly.
Cousins Henry Kravis and George Roberts—two of the three founders of KKR—have overseen the best-known corporate buy-out company side-by-side for decades.
For the last four years, CEOs John Mackey and Walter Robb have run Whole Foods. Mackey co-founded Whole Foods in 1980 and Robb joined in 1991, a year before the company went public. Robb was named co-CEO alongside Mackey in 2010. Since then, Whole Foods has continued its rapid-fire expansion and seen its stock price increase from $13.73 per share to $39 now, (though that’s down from a high of $63.13 last year.)
Under co-CEOs, start-up Birchbox, which sells monthly subscriptions to beauty samples, and eyewear company Warby Parker have raised $71.9 million and $115.5 million, respectively.
The common thread in these successful examples is that one—if not both—CEOs founded the company. “Generally, when multiple people are involved, they must have complementary skills or assets, they must be willing to work together, recognize the other’s expertise in areas, and give in to the other based on that expertise,” Hrebiniak says. People who built a business from the bottom up can tick more of those boxes than two individuals who are thrown into a shared leadership role without an existing side-by-side relationship.
Based on her research, Greer says that power struggles can be defused when co-leaders are as equal as they can be in terms of status and privilege, down to their salary and office size.
Catz and Hurd are certainly well compensated—both earned a base salary of $950,000 and racked in total compensation of about $44 million in 2013. And, to Hrebiniak’s point, though the two new CEOs don’t have a founders’ connection, they’ve managed to balance each other out for the past four years, carving out opposite but correlative niches. Catz focuses on internal finance, legal, and manufacturing matters, while Hurd handle outside affairs, like sales and service.
The wild card in this arrangement is Ellison, who has opted to take on a role as chief technology officer at Oracle. Fortune’s Adam Lashinksyargues that Thursday’s management shuffle was largely for show. “The most shocking thing about Thursday’s bombshell announcement that Larry Ellison is stepping down as CEO of Oracle is how little will change,” he wrote.
Hrebiniak agrees. “Three people are running the show. What do we call that? A trilogy?” he says.
Oracle better figure this all out soon. Having two CEOs is tough. The only thing that might be worse is having three.

拉里·埃裏森任命了兩名接班人。
從軟件巨頭甲骨文公司（Oracle）創始人拉里?埃裏森平素的生活方式看，就知道他應該非常信奉“多多益善”這個準則。坐擁預計460億美元個人資產的埃裏森在硅谷建造了一座奢華的日式豪宅，在馬里布也購買了令人豔羨的海景別墅，去年還贊助了美洲盃帆船賽，兩年前還在夏威夷購買了一整座島嶼。
上週四，埃裏森的接班聲明也表現出了另一種“多多益善”的意思。
70歲的埃裏森選擇了兩個人共同執掌甲骨文的CEO權杖，其中一個是2010年加盟甲骨文的前惠普公司(Hewlett-Packard)CEO馬克?赫德，另一個是在甲骨文任首席財務官多年的薩弗拉?卡茨。
甲骨文將成爲目前第四家同時擁有兩名CEO的財富500強企業，另外三家分別是美國金融集團（American Financial Group）、KKR和全食公司（Whole Foods）。另外，在過去25年裏，只有21家公司曾經使用過聯席CEO的組織架構。（當然，也有很多規模稍小的公司使用這種模式。）作爲今年財富500強榜單上的第82位，甲骨文也將成爲史上第22家由兩人共同掌權的財富500強企業。
聯席CEO的例子之所以罕見，是有其原因的。
斯坦福商學院（Stanford Graduate School of Business）組織行爲學助理教授林德萊德?格里爾指出，聯席CEO結構會“引起衝突，導致團隊的負面表現”，並且導致兩名CEO互相產生“敵對心態”。
那麼，這就是全部原因嗎？
格里爾的研究主要集中在團隊權力衝突領域。他表示：“當你擁有了權力，你看待自己的角度就發生了變化。一旦你坐上這個位子，你對可能危及自身權力的威脅就會非常敏感。”其中一個潛在威脅，就是和你享有同樣頭銜和職權的另一名CEO。
並不是說所有的聯席CEO架構都以噩夢告終，但我們可以大膽地說，至少許多采用這種管理架構的公司都招致徹頭徹尾的災難。
比如，MSO公司在2008年7月調整了管理架構，由溫達?米勒德和羅賓?馬利諾兩人共同擔任CEO，當時該公司董事長查爾斯?考普曼曾這樣解釋這一戰略：“一加一等於三。”結果還不到一年，“一加一”戰略就宣告失敗了。2008年，MSO公司宣告虧損1570萬美元，米勒德隨後出走。在米勒德離職後，考普曼也坦承“兩名CEO關係緊張”。
1998年到2000年，桑迪?威爾和約翰?裏德曾在花旗集團（Citigroup）擔任聯席CEO，後來二人也是反目成仇。沃頓商學院（Wharton）管理學榮譽教授勞倫斯?賀比尼亞克表示，在決定公司發展方向的問題上，兩位CEO都是“有着強硬觀點的強勢領導人，因此‘兩駕馬車’的領導架構對他們的效果並不好。”
在SAP公司，吉姆?斯內布和比爾?麥克德莫特也曾共同治理這家公司三年半的時間。在此期間，SAP斥140億美元巨資大舉進行收購，同期SAP的股價也增長了70%之外。但也正是在同一時期，SAP開始在雲計算專家的面前丟城失地。2013年斯內布辭去CEO職務，完全將權力交給麥克德莫特，他本人稱，自己需要“開始職業生涯的下一個階段，多陪家人。”
Chipotle目前由兩位CEO史蒂夫?埃爾斯和蒙蒂?莫蘭共同執掌。Chipotle也是餐飲界近年來冉冉升起的少數明星企業之一。但它的領導層也引起了一些批評，尤其是兩位CEO的成本問題。今年五月，該公司77%的股東投票反對高管薪酬方案。
廣告巨頭陽獅集團（Publicis）和宏盟集團（Omnicom）合併失敗，使雙方共建全球最大廣告公司的雄心化作泡影，其中一個重要的原因就是兩位CEO個性不合。
不過，聯席CEO合作愉快的例子還是有一些的。
KKR公司三位創始人中的兩人，亨利?克拉維斯和喬治?羅伯茨，是表兄弟，他們並肩執掌這家知名的企業收購公司已經幾十年了。
在過去4年，約翰?麥基和沃特?羅伯兩人一直共同執掌全食公司。麥基於1980年參與創辦了全食公司，而羅伯於1991年加入，次年全食公司正式上市。羅伯於2010年被任命爲全食的聯合CEO。從那時起，全食公司繼續保持了火箭般的擴張速度，股價也從每股13.73美元升至現在的39美元（去年最高時曾一度達到63.13美元）。
在聯席CEO架構下，創業公司Birchbox（主要賣美容產品樣品）和眼鏡零售商Warby Parker公司分別成功融資7190萬美元和1.155億美元。
在聯席CEO架構實行得比較成功的公司中，有一點是不約而同的——那就是兩名CEO中至少有一人是公司創始人。賀比尼亞克表示：“一般來說，如果涉及幾個人，那麼他們必須有互相補充的技能或資本，必須願意互相共事，認識到對方在某些領域的特長，並且在這些領域要向對方讓步。”與那些之前沒有一起共事過就“空降”到聯合CEO崗位上的人相比，企業創始人一般更能滿足這幾個條件。
格里爾表示，根據她的研究顯示，兩位聯席CEO之間在各方面越平等，越有助於消彌他們的權力鬥爭。這種平等大到地位和特權，小到薪水和辦公室的大小。
卡茨和赫德的薪水待遇顯然是很不錯的——兩人的底薪都是95萬美元，2013年，兩人從公司領走的總薪酬都是4400萬美元左右。在賀比尼亞克看來，雖然兩位CEO都不是甲骨文的創始人，但他們在過去四年裏一直維繫着彼此的平衡，各自在相反但又相關的領域開拓。卡茨主要負責公司的內部財務、法務和生產事宜，而赫德主要負責銷售和服務等外部事宜。
甲骨文此次安排的幕後推手正是埃裏森本人，他決定“退而不休”，繼續擔任甲骨文首席技術官的角色。《財富》（Fortune）雜誌的亞當?拉辛斯基認爲，甲骨文的此次管理層洗牌很大程度上是作了一場秀。“上週四甲骨文傳來拉里?埃裏森卸任CEO的重磅消息，然而最令人震驚的事實卻是，此次管理層的調整對甲骨文的影響其實非常小。”
賀比尼亞克也認同這種觀點：“這是一出三個人演的戲。我們應該怎樣叫它？三部曲嗎？”
甲骨文最好早點找出解決方案來。有兩個CEO就夠麻煩了，更惶論有三個。