Leadership

'Tis The Season For Firing Top Executives

By Peter Galuszka

Updated on: January 14, 2009 / 3:24 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Yahoo President Susan Decker's departure is just one of a series of top corporate officials to be fired or resign in the first two weeks of 2009. It's been a brief but bloody year so far.

Decker had wanted the CEO's spot at Yahoo which went to Carol Bartz and she is leaving. Some at other firms were pushed.

Here's a recent list since New Year's:

William Watkins, CEO, and David Wickersham, president and COO, at Seagate Technology. (See Steve Tobaks' account here).
Richard L. Bond of Tyson Foods.
Steve Barnhart of Orbitz.
Scott A. Edmunds at Chico's FAS
Gregory Scott from Bebe.

And, there may be even bigger fish to fry in coming days and weeks. Here's a list of embattled CEOs who might be cashiered:

Rick Wagoner of General Motors.
Vikram Pandit of Citigroup.
Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems.
Steve Ordland of Office Depot.
Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America.

A lot of this, of course, has to do with bad times since departures go up then. Pandit, for instance has been in office for only 18 months at Citi and inherited a mess-in-the-making. With the financial crisis gone full-tilt this summer, he hasn't had much time for re-engineering. As for Wagoner, he has stubbornly held a bad hand and badly miscalculated when he flew to Washington in a corporate jet to ask for a public bailout. Schwartz has long been accused of being ditsy. And for others, their demise is just dumb luck.

Still, the numbers are increasing. 56 CEOs on the S&P 500 list left in 2007 and 61 in that group left in 2008. We're only halfway through January and we have six already. (although not are all on the S&P 500 list).

Looks like a fun year.