THE SENIOR MEN'S CLUB OF NEW CANAAN
Regular meeting of March 30, 2001
MINUTES
President Don Hunziker opened the business meeting with 143 members present. Current
membership is 499, with 1 invitee and 32 on the waiting list.
ANNOUNCEMENTS & ACTIVITIES
Ed Codel is still at Waveny. There will be an SMC board meeting at 8:30 a.m. on 4/6.
For SMC's geezer gourmands the annual luncheon will be $30, 4/27 at noon in the NC
Country Club. Volunteers are needed for coffee duty.
Activities: Bowling, Bridge and Paddle continue; Racquetball snagged 3
players both Monday and Wednesday; Trailblazers will do Mianus Gorge 4/18.
4Fs OD'd on Vidalia onion appetizers last week and breathlessly seek another
tangy heart burn dispensary .
Couth: UN and NY Botanical Gardens trips are full and the prospective Washington
outing scheduled for October 23-25 has 44 signees.
Jester: Jim Schlumpf revealed how judiciously splitting a Big Mac can be a touching
tale of tandem toothsome togetherness.
SPEAKER
Vice President Clancy Fauntleroy introduced Dayton Ogden, chairman of the Spencer Stewart
management recruiting firm. He lives in New Canaan and is the
son and son-in-law of SMC members Dayton Ogden, Sr., and Bill Reid, respectively.
A Yale graduate, he served in the US Navy in Vietnam, joined Spencer Stewart in 1979,
was elected CEO in 1987 and chairman in 1999.
Speaking about "What's Going on Out There?" Dayton gave us a corporate
head-hunter's view of the revolving doors to those "rooms at the top." He reported
that 2/3 of major companies have replaced their CEOs once or more since 1995; the average
tenure of CEOs is now 4 years; and half the CEOs of Fortune 500
companies have been in their jobs less than 3 years. In short takes on high profile
CEO deconstruction, Dayton mentioned Xerox,
whose old line corporate culture spelled disaster when anew CEO from outside tried
to reinvent the company. Coke's new CEO couldn't delegate, presided over two years of falling
earnings, fumbled crisis PR and alienated Coke's bottlers. Lucent's new CEO didn't capitalize
on gains, aimed at 20% growth and delivered 6%, suffered strategy failures and brain-drain as
company market value shrank.
Dayton believes orderly succession is Job One for corporate boards. He cited GE's process over
a period of 6 years and thousands of hours devoted to the search in which the directors came to
know the 24 candidates well, and narrowed the
choice to three. After the decision, the two also-rans left to become CEOs of two major corporations.
The CEO job gets tougher, Dayton says, because of increasing business
complexity and pace of change. The perfect CEO can "look around the corner ," is a
"super-hero,"
sophisticated globally, able to grow the company and cut costs at the same time. In his/her
"career path" says Dayton, this person will have lived and worked overseas, been a financial
manager, and had general management
responsibility for a major corporation. Place applications on the table as you leave.
Les Brooks, Asst. Secretary