Spring Cleaning

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There's no guarantee, of course, that any or all of these steps will shelter a new CEO from investor wrath or ensure long-term success. Rakesh Khurana, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, finds it troubling that even after boards fire a CEO, few engage in self-criticism. "It's not clear whether we'll be witnessing any dramatic reconsideration of what went wrong," says Khurana, author of an acclaimed book criticizing the phenomenon of celebrity CEOs, Searching for a Corporate Savior.

By the same token, the management skills needed to restore a crisis-ridden company to profitability may not be the same as those required for years of sustainable growth. "CEOs don't singlehandedly turn around a large organization," says Paul Coombes, a director of corporate governance at McKinsey & Co. "The problem is that strategies change at a fast rate and need to keep adapting quickly, but organizational changes of a lasting sort require a great deal of patience." That may be. But at least the new boys know where they stand: if they mess up, they'll be out of a job fast, just like the ones they replaced.