Chief executive doesn’t compare to president

Herman Gordon, Las Vegas

Monday, Sept. 22, 2008 | 2:05 a.m.

The former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, unabashedly announced that the four current candidates for president and vice president are not qualified to run a large corporation. Now, that’s chutzpah ... and self-deception, false pride, guile, delusion, bunko. One comparison between the two jobs should be enough.

When a president makes an important decision, it is imperative he mobilize and sustain public support if he wants the decision to be effective and successful. That is tough — it means leadership.

When a chief executive makes an important decision, it may need the approval of the board of directors or a majority of stockholders. Now, in the face of corporate governance we are beginning to recognize and criticize, let’s stop kidding ourselves.

In most corporations, the majority of votes are controlled by the chief executive, either by ownership or by influence of board members. Remember, it is the chief executive or his nominating committee who puts up the nominee for the board, and the board must approve the name — the very board members who were put on the board by the chief executive this way in the first place.

So, obviously, board members and the chief executive wash one another’s hands. (The exceptions are the really huge corporations in which pension funds and mutual funds have significant stock holdings.)

So it’s really easy to make decisions in the corporation. Just about any executive can qualify, in my opinion. Conscience and ego are the only real guides. Would you say the same for the president, who must consider the views of the people he or she governs as well as the other branches of government?