Headhunter Coup in The Magic Kingdom
Roche has been called the "headhunter of the century."
November 29, 2004
Headhunter Coup in The Magic Kingdom
The search for a new Walt Disney Co. CEO was one of the most coveted assignments
in the extremely competitive executive search firm industry. And
Chicago-based Heidrick & Struggles emerged as the winner over Russell
Reynolds Associates and Spencer Stuart due in part to Gerry Roche.
Insiders
say Roche, senior chairman of the $318 million firm, snatched the assignment
away from front-runner Charles Tribbett III, head of the diversity practice at
Russell Reynolds.
“I heard that the (Disney) board offered Gerry 45 minutes
to do a presentation, and supposedly he said he only needed 15,” says Scott
Scanlon, chairman and CEO of Hunt-Scanlon, an industry market research firm.
Roche won’t discuss the Disney assignment, but his past work might point to
how he intends to find candidates to succeed Michael Eisner, who plans to step
down when his contract expires in September 2006.
In what Scanlon called a
“brilliant headhunter move,” Roche deftly orchestrated the placement of two
big-company CEOs in 2000.
His clients: Home Depot and 3M. The candidates: two
of the three men who were being groomed to succeed Jack Welch at General
Electric. Roche says he was in touch with the GE candidates, and all he had to
do was wait for GE to tap Welch’s successor. As soon as it did, choosing Jeffrey
Immelt as GE’s chairman and CEO, Roche swooped in and plucked Robert Nardelli to
become Home Depot’s president and CEO and W. James McNerney Jr. to be CEO at 3M.
Perhaps Roche’s pick will be a cross-industry or cross-functional placement
such as these. It is a style Roche has mastered, experts say, pointing to his
placement of Pepsico president and marketing guru John Sculley at Apple Computer
in 1983.
Roche, who has been in the recruiting business for more than 40
years and whose peers named him “Headhunter of the Century” in a 2000 poll
conducted by Hunt-Scanlon, is said to have placed more CEOs than any other
recruiter.
“Heidrick delivers quality candidates,” says recruiter Kevin
Berchelmann of Triangle Performance in Bellaire, Texas. “You could mix (the
candidate names) all up in a bucket and pick any of them. They are going to be
dead-on.”
Roche, who has personally placed CEOs at the Gap, IBM and
PricewaterhouseCoopers, discloses his technique for finding the best candidate:
“The secret is putting the client, the candidate and the whole process ahead of
yourself.”
How well Roche does will be determined in part by the change in
Disney’s stock price the day a successor is named, which should be by June,
Disney reports.
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