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 Salesforce.com 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·埃里森任命了两名接班人。
从软件巨头甲骨文公司（Oracle）创始人拉里?埃里森平素的生活方式看，就知道他应该非常信奉“多多益善”这个准则。坐拥预计460亿美元个人资产的埃里森在硅谷建造了一座奢华的日式豪宅，在马里布也购买了令人艳羡的海景别墅，去年还赞助了美洲杯帆船赛，两年前还在夏威夷购买了一整座岛屿。
上周四，埃里森的接班声明也表现出了另一种“多多益善”的意思。
70岁的埃里森选择了两个人共同执掌甲骨文的CEO权杖，其中一个是2010年加盟甲骨文的前惠普公司(Hewlett-Packard)CEO马克?赫德，另一个是在甲骨文任首席财务官多年的萨弗拉?卡茨。
甲骨文将成为目前第四家同时拥有两名CEO的财富500强企业，另外三家分别是美国金融集团（American Financial Group）、KKR和全食公司（Whole Foods）。另外，在过去25年里，只有21家公司曾经使用过联席CEO的组织架构。（当然，也有很多规模稍小的公司使用这种模式。）作为今年财富500强榜单上的第82位，甲骨文也将成为史上第22家由两人共同掌权的财富500强企业。
联席CEO的例子之所以罕见，是有其原因的。
斯坦福商学院（Stanford Graduate School of Business）组织行为学助理教授林德莱德?格里尔指出，联席CEO结构会“引起冲突，导致团队的负面表现”，并且导致两名CEO互相产生“敌对心态”。
那么，这就是全部原因吗？
格里尔的研究主要集中在团队权力冲突领域。他表示：“当你拥有了权力，你看待自己的角度就发生了变化。一旦你坐上这个位子，你对可能危及自身权力的威胁就会非常敏感。”其中一个潜在威胁，就是和你享有同样头衔和职权的另一名CEO。
并不是说所有的联席CEO架构都以噩梦告终，但我们可以大胆地说，至少许多采用这种管理架构的公司都招致彻头彻尾的灾难。
比如，MSO公司在2008年7月调整了管理架构，由温达?米勒德和罗宾?马利诺两人共同担任CEO，当时该公司董事长查尔斯?考普曼曾这样解释这一战略：“一加一等于三。”结果还不到一年，“一加一”战略就宣告失败了。2008年，MSO公司宣告亏损1570万美元，米勒德随后出走。在米勒德离职后，考普曼也坦承“两名CEO关系紧张”。
1998年到2000年，桑迪?威尔和约翰?里德曾在花旗集团（Citigroup）担任联席CEO，后来二人也是反目成仇。沃顿商学院（Wharton）管理学荣誉教授劳伦斯?贺比尼亚克表示，在决定公司发展方向的问题上，两位CEO都是“有着强硬观点的强势领导人，因此‘两驾马车’的领导架构对他们的效果并不好。”
在SAP公司，吉姆?斯内布和比尔?麦克德莫特也曾共同治理这家公司三年半的时间。在此期间，SAP斥140亿美元巨资大举进行收购，同期SAP的股价也增长了70%之外。但也正是在同一时期，SAP开始在云计算专家Salesforce.com的面前丢城失地。2013年斯内布辞去CEO职务，完全将权力交给麦克德莫特，他本人称，自己需要“开始职业生涯的下一个阶段，多陪家人。”
Chipotle目前由两位CEO史蒂夫?埃尔斯和蒙蒂?莫兰共同执掌。Chipotle也是餐饮界近年来冉冉升起的少数明星企业之一。但它的领导层也引起了一些批评，尤其是两位CEO的成本问题。今年五月，该公司77%的股东投票反对高管薪酬方案。
广告巨头阳狮集团（Publicis）和宏盟集团（Omnicom）合并失败，使双方共建全球最大广告公司的雄心化作泡影，其中一个重要的原因就是两位CEO个性不合。
不过，联席CEO合作愉快的例子还是有一些的。
KKR公司三位创始人中的两人，亨利?克拉维斯和乔治?罗伯茨，是表兄弟，他们并肩执掌这家知名的企业收购公司已经几十年了。
在过去4年，约翰?麦基和沃特?罗伯两人一直共同执掌全食公司。麦基于1980年参与创办了全食公司，而罗伯于1991年加入，次年全食公司正式上市。罗伯于2010年被任命为全食的联合CEO。从那时起，全食公司继续保持了火箭般的扩张速度，股价也从每股13.73美元升至现在的39美元（去年最高时曾一度达到63.13美元）。
在联席CEO架构下，创业公司Birchbox（主要卖美容产品样品）和眼镜零售商Warby Parker公司分别成功融资7190万美元和1.155亿美元。
在联席CEO架构实行得比较成功的公司中，有一点是不约而同的——那就是两名CEO中至少有一人是公司创始人。贺比尼亚克表示：“一般来说，如果涉及几个人，那么他们必须有互相补充的技能或资本，必须愿意互相共事，认识到对方在某些领域的特长，并且在这些领域要向对方让步。”与那些之前没有一起共事过就“空降”到联合CEO岗位上的人相比，企业创始人一般更能满足这几个条件。
格里尔表示，根据她的研究显示，两位联席CEO之间在各方面越平等，越有助于消弥他们的权力斗争。这种平等大到地位和特权，小到薪水和办公室的大小。
卡茨和赫德的薪水待遇显然是很不错的——两人的底薪都是95万美元，2013年，两人从公司领走的总薪酬都是4400万美元左右。在贺比尼亚克看来，虽然两位CEO都不是甲骨文的创始人，但他们在过去四年里一直维系着彼此的平衡，各自在相反但又相关的领域开拓。卡茨主要负责公司的内部财务、法务和生产事宜，而赫德主要负责销售和服务等外部事宜。
甲骨文此次安排的幕后推手正是埃里森本人，他决定“退而不休”，继续担任甲骨文首席技术官的角色。《财富》（Fortune）杂志的亚当?拉辛斯基认为，甲骨文的此次管理层洗牌很大程度上是作了一场秀。“上周四甲骨文传来拉里?埃里森卸任CEO的重磅消息，然而最令人震惊的事实却是，此次管理层的调整对甲骨文的影响其实非常小。”
贺比尼亚克也认同这种观点：“这是一出三个人演的戏。我们应该怎样叫它？三部曲吗？”
甲骨文最好早点找出解决方案来。有两个CEO就够麻烦了，更惶论有三个。