Dennis Carey Info.

Since 1981, Dennis Carey has been an arbitrator with the American Arbitration Association (AAA). This organization “provides services to individuals and organizations who wish to resolve conflicts out of court.” Recent news at the organization is that it will be administering the Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Mediation Program (RMFM) in response to the residential mortgage crisis in Florida. It will begin this work on July 1, 2010. What has been happening in Florida is that the mortgage crisis resulted in more than half a million homes being foreclosed last year. To alleviate the legal aspects of this issue, the RMFM Program was instituted by the AAA.

RMFM and Dennis Carey

The new RMFM Program is a welcome venture to anyone working in arbitration.  Instead of residential mortgage foreclosures being dealt with through legal means, the AAA will be taking on this task, significantly reducing the pressure in such a situation. If the homeowner in this circumstance decides to take up the offer of this program, the first step will be mortgage foreclosure counseling. There will thereafter be mediation between the lender and homeowner in an attempt to reach a settlement with ease and speed.

Dennis Carey is an expert in recruitment of CEOs and board directors. As of this writing he has authored at least four books that discuss the issues surrounding board compensation, corporate governance, and director recruitment. We have reviewed and recommend two, so far, below.

Popular Books by Dennis Carey

Two of his popular books include CEO Succession and How to Run a Company: Lessons from Top Leaders of the CEO Academy.  CEO Succession focuses on helping companies to deal with succession planning.  The book offers a road map of sorts to ensure that companies have a steady flow of effective leadership and smooth transitions.

More on Dennis Carey Writings

How to Run a Company contains principles and concepts that he has taught over the years in his CEO Academy, which brings together CEOs from all over the world periodically. In this book, readers will find advice from high-caliber business leaders.

In recent news at Korn/Ferry International, Byrne Mulrooney has joined the Korn/Ferry team as the CEO of Futurestep.  Korn/Ferry International, a global provider of talent management solutions where Dennis Carey is a Senior Client Partner, announced this change on April 1, 2010.

As the CEO of Futurestep, Mr. Mulrooney will be in charge of this division of Korn/Ferry which is a market leader in recruitment process outsourcing, with a presence in close to 20 countries.

Before coming to Korn/Ferry, Mr. Mulrooney was President and COO of Flynn Transportation Services, a third party logistics company.

Mark Spitz

In the 80s and 90s the International Swimming Hall of Fame was displayed swimming memorabilia, such as Johnny Wiessmuller’s Olympic medals and Mark Spitz’s starting block, in style. In the early 2000s, however, the state of the displays was deteriorating and the Hall of Fame’s finances were in the dog house. To complete the picture, a burglary in December, 2004 resulted in the loss of a majority of its most valuable memorabilia.

In May of 2005 Bruce Wigo stepped in to become the Hall’s new Chief Executive Officer. With the help of his longtime friend Dennis Carey, who was at the time a consultant for an executive search firm, they were able to convince the entire 21 member board to resign and also to give Wigo and Carey the authority to appoint a new board. After the board was dissolved Dennis Carey immediately began to work on convincing Mark Spitz to head the new board of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

Dennis Carey is a former swimmer and the son of a swimming coach and will is also a member of the new board at the Hall of Fame.

As the head of the newly appointed board, Spitz said that he hoped there would be stricter standards for selection into the hall, more fund-raising and sponsorships. He also looked forward to seeing more modernization of the various displays so that they could be more interactive and child-friendly.

Dennis Carey, in his book entitled CEO Succession,  makes a strong case for the newly appointed CEO to already begin planning his replacement, even as he is dealing with the other myriad urgent issues vying for his attention at the outset of his tenure. As Carey puts it,

“Planning for a successor can go a long way toward reassuring employees and investors and steadying the company. And if the new CEO isn’t interested in the task, the board should be.”

Carey understands that planning for your own departure might not be a task most people would want to tackle. According to Carey,

“After all, it’s human nature to avoid dealing with things that entail planning for your own demise. Yet, no CEO is ever completely safe from an abrupt end to a career, whether through illness, poor performance, or other reasons. No one is immortal and there is no guarantee that a CEO will remain with the company until retirement.”

According to Carey, a successful company is one that can, “focus on building strength and leadership at every level.”

It might seem strange, or at least counter-intuitive, to begin looking for your own replacement immediately upon beginning a new job, but that is exactly what Dennis Carey recommends should be the task of a newly appointed CEO.

According to Dennis Carey in his book CEO Succession,

“Companies that are truly successful at succession are those that focus on building strength and leadership at every level. If done continuously and properly, this “succession culture” becomes an integral part of the fabric of the company. A fabric or matrix is, in fact, a good way of conceptualizing “succession culture,” fostering strong relationships and interdependency of individuals at all levels.”

In an article appearing in the McKinsey Quarterly, Dennis Carey explains the need for boards to focus their energies on creating corporate strategies for success. As Carey writes:

“As companies turn their attention from compliance to growth and innovation, boards must focus on strategy.”

Several years ago new accounting compliance rules were established by landmark congressional legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Due to this comprehensive law corporations were forced to turn inward for a time to retool their companies to better comply with legislation.

As Dennis Carey observes in his article,

“Now, by and large, boards have come to terms with the new governance rules, and it’s time to move on.”

Moving on means that instead of boards attending to compliance, it is time to refocus and attend to ways to create to link, “a board’s human capital to the long-term strategy crafted by management to create more value for shareholders.” This, according to Carey, “should be the next wave of governance reform.”

Recent business trends have shown a marked increase in the number of former chief executives taking active roles in steering troubled companies.  For instance, John “Jack” Krol was recently named as outside chairman of the auto-parts maker Delphi Automotive LLP.  He is a retired chief executive of DuPoint Co.

Dennis Carey, a senior client partner at recruiters Korn/Ferry International, explains that “”These chairmen are strategic equal partners of the CEO because they already demonstrated a successful ‘in the trenches’ style of management.”

Mr. Krol, who Dennis Carey helped to recruit, says he has worked on Delphi matters quite a bit, and that he was planning to advise Delphi CEO Rodney O’Neal on his 2010 and 2011 operational plans.

In a Wall Street Journal article in 2008 entitled, “ Speed is Key Question as New CEOs Remake Team,” Dennis Carey explains that “faster is generally better than slower” for replacing a CEO.  However, he also cautions that “too much churn can be very disruptive.”

Certainly, when a new CEO comes to the team, there are many decisions that the new leader must make. One of them is to decide how quickly to turn over pieces of the team.  Within his first two months as CEO of VeriSign Inc, for instance, Bill Roper hired two new deputies.  He then quickly replaced another executive and named two more new lieutenants.

Executive recruiter Dennis Carey explains that the speed of the chances usually hinge upon the circumstances under which the new CEO was hired.  For instance, if the promotion was an internal one for a well-run company there might be few turnovers.  If, instead, an outside comes to a troubled company, the executive changes are usually much faster and broader.  In general the jobs that will change first, under these circumstances, are the CFO, the general counsel and the human resources head.

Since its inception in 2001 by Dennis Carey, a well known executive recruiter, the CEO Academy has met yearly in New York.  The point of this unique meeting is for CEOs to learn from veteran corporate and business leaders and to share their experiences.

Moderated most years by Larry Bossidy, this forum is an off-the-record opportunity for CEOs to learn from each other and to expand their expertise and knowledge base.

Past speakers as part of the CEO Academy have included:  A.G. Lafley, The Procter & Gamble Company; Bob Lane, Deere & Company; Andrew Liveris, The Dow Chemical Company; John Lundgren, The Stanley Works; William McComb, Liz Claiborne, Inc.; Joseph McGrath, Unisys Corporation; Steve Odland, Office Depot, Inc. and many others.