How Many Minutes of Infamy?(Brief Article)

The news cycle has turned on Europe's new class of celebrity CEOs. Percy Barnevik, formerly of ABB and the retired pioneer of this group, was forced by angry investors to return a chunk of his 100 million euro parting gift to himself. Class wunderkind Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi is suddenly less luminous after his company lost [currency]14 billion in 2001. And Jurgen Schrempp, the feted architect of DaimlerChrysler, is under fire for failing to make the merger work. For all, celebrity is backfiring. "CEOs now know, the more you court publicity, the more you court disaster," says Amin Rajan, founder of Create consultants in London.

The future of the klieg-lit corporate chieftain looks dim, at least for now. Left behind by the U.S. boom of the '90s, European governments tried to spark a stock-culture revolution of their own by encouraging venture capital and launching new markets for high-growth companies. This set the stage for the emergence of performers like Messier & Co., if only briefly. Now, as a downturn and the Enron scandal cast doubt on the claims of all corporate actors, a high profile is no longer an obvious plus. As the Harvard Business Review concluded in March, "It is, at long last, OK for leaders to be mere mortals."

Perhaps luckily for Europe, it came late to the celebrity-CEO game. The rock-star mentality never took hold as it has in the United States, where executives hire agents to manage their careers. Search firm Spencer Stuart estimates that a third of the CEOs running the 700 largest U.S. companies are glamorous hired guns. Europe's chieftains, by contrast, tend to be insiders. Schrempp started at Daimler as an apprentice mechanic. Messier toiled as a bureaucrat and investment banker before he cleaned up a water utility, changed its name to Vivendi and bought his way into the Hollywood spotlight. Kevin Delaney, human-resources expert in London for PriceWaterhouseCoopers, says he has had many clients ask him to "get me one of those U.S.-style celebrity CEOs." But once they analyze their own business model, they tend to promote from within.

Their caution has been reinforced by author Jim Collins's recent search for what makes good companies truly great. In "Good to Great," his study of 1,435 U.S. companies found a negative correlation between how many times a CEO appears in the media and how well his or her company performs. While no similar study has been performed in Europe, experts believe the risks are the same. "Being in the news too many times can be seductive," says Manfred Kets de Vries, a psychologist and a business professor at Insead, who runs a seminar for CEOs. "They start believing their own press."

Some analysts wonder if that's what happened to Schrempp. Lionized for the technically stunning Chrysler merger in 1998, his troubles began in late 2000 ...