In the end, he was just another gray man in a tan overcoat, trying to catch a cab on a crowded Manhattan street.
In his '90s heyday, former WorldCom Inc. chief executive Bernard J. Ebbers was a cowboy-boot-wearing, larger-than-life personality with a 60-foot yacht. He bragged about his highflying stock price that helped him swallow up more valuable companies.
Today, Ebbers is facing a maximum of 85 years in prison after being convicted on all counts -- conspiracy, securities fraud and filing the false accounting statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission that led to WorldCom improperly accounting for $11 billion, a key to the company's near-collapse and the loss of millions in shareholder value.
Ebbers -- who grimly waited among a throng of photographers for a taxi to take him away from the federal courthouse in New York yesterday afternoon -- becomes the latest of a string of humbled chief executives, brought down by aggressive federal prosecutors, empowered shareholders and boards, whistle-blowers or arrogance.
Two other '90s corporate highfliers have trials underway -- former Tyco International Ltd. chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski, known for lavish parties thrown at corporate expense, is being retried for accounting fraud. Also, former HealthSouth Corp. chairman Richard M. Scrushy, also charged with accounting fraud, is facing a shareholder suit claiming he stole company money to buy a Lamborghini, fly friends to the Grammy Awards and promote a band.
‘Rock star CEOs’
"I'd like to know how many covers of Fortune, Forbes and Business Week those three were on," said Ann Yerger, executive director of the Council of Institutional Investors, an organization of large pension funds that own shares in public companies. "We're not in the era of rock star CEOs anymore."
It is a vast turnaround from the days of corporate titan as outsize media celebrity. Some hope it marks the end of one kind of chief executive and the beginning of a new era. They point to buttoned-down Robert A. Iger, chief executive-elect of Walt Disney Co., who will follow the colorful and unpredictable Michael D. Eisner, as one example. Another is Martin J. Sullivan, taking over for longtime chief executive Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg at insurance giant American International Group Inc.
Others say, no, megalomaniac chief executives will always be with us, in fact, should be with us, because their oversize ambitions can spark innovation and growth.
"We don't want to harness that entrepreneurial spirit," said Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, associate dean at the Yale School of Management. "Unpredictability is often a great value of leadership. Hopefully, the public will be able to separate between the playful clowning of Donald Trump versus the piggish behavior of Dennis Kozlowski. Some are creative builders. These people [like Ebbers] are hired gangsters who ripped us off."
Sonnenfeld pointed to Apple Computer Inc.'s Steve Jobs -- who rarely passes up a turn on the stage to trumpet some new product, his image beamed on giant video screens -- as an example of a grandiose chief executive who pushes the edge but plays by the rules.
The list of former corporate chiefs who lost their swagger is familiar: Enron Corp.'s Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling (who claimed their financial calculus was beyond the grasp of mere mortals), the Rigas family of Adelphia Communications Corp. (convicted of treating the cable company as a personal ATM), Joseph P. Nacchio of Qwest Communications International Inc. (sued by the SEC yesterday for accounting fraud), Jean-Marie Messier of former media giant Vivendi Universal (whose autobiography was titled "Me, Myself, Master of the World"), Michael J. Saylor of software maker MicroStrategy Inc. ("I feel that if I don't succeed, it's an abomination in the eyes of God," he once said) and on and on.
Some, like Ebbers, broke the law. Others, like Carly Fiorina, dumped in February as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co. days after hobnobbing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, simply struggled as chief executives.
"Carly Fiorina didn't earn it. She liked the trappings of power . . . but she didn't create anything," Sonnenfeld said.
The new humility
Yerger said she and other corporate-watchers see the next HP chief as a bellwether for the next wave of chief executive hires. "I do think it will be someone very different from Carly Fiorina," who was in the mold of the 1990s "CEO deities," Yerger said.
Some chief executives and companies have managed to transition from one form of leadership to another, thanks to internal or external pressure.
Friends claim Martha Stewart is a changed woman after her five-month imprisonment for lying to federal investigators about her role in an insider stock trading scandal. Stewart fired off a snippy e-mail to her employees after a Christmas party at the company headquarters one year, upbraiding them for dropping cookie crumbs on the industrial space's concrete floor. Now, she advocates women's prison reform and said she became close to fellow inmates at the Alderson, W.Va., prison.
Global conglomerate General Electric Co. was run for years by John F. "Jack" Welch, a fiery bantam who chewed through life and in-house rivals on his way to the top, earning the nickname "Neutron Jack" for the way he slashed jobs: Buildings were left standing, but the people were gone.
Welch retired in 2001, and a year later the messy details of his divorce and affair with former Harvard Business Review editor Suzy Wetlaufer became public, dulling some of his luster. (Welch can welcome recently departed Boeing Co. chief executive Harry C. Stonecipher to this club.)
By contrast, Welch's successor, Jeffrey R. Immelt, is a former Dartmouth University football player with a degree in applied mathematics who, though competitive, does not live as grandiosely or inspire fear as Welch did.
In an interview on Monday, Iger reflected what may come to be known as the New Humility when asked if he has picked his successor as Disney's president.
"I was careful not to embark on choosing my cabinet before I was elected," he said.
