Word: benning
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With their stock melting, ice cream icons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield have created a new flavor for their management repertoire: the Holland Heave...
Cohen and Greenfield, of course, are the hippie founders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, the Waterbury, Vermont-based superpremium ice-cream maker that vaulted to prominence with its quirky management style and equally quirky flavors, including Chubby Hubby and Chunky Monkey. Ben and Jerry have made a very public effort to put the environment, politics and people before profits--an unpardonable sin in the canon of Wall Street and a style that worked so long as Baby Boomers were ignoring their fat intake and scarfing Cherry Garcia by the pint...
...this is the lean, fat-free 1990s, and superpremium ice-cream sales have been flatter than Nebraska, which makes Ben & Jerry's just another company with a management problem. So forget all the sugary explanations heard since CEO Robert Holland said on Sept. 27 that he would resign. The party line: Holland accomplished his mission, solving production problems and launching critical expansions into new products and countries; now the company needs a CEO with greater marketing skills...
...reality, those skills have been needed from the start--and the big scoop is that Holland's days have been numbered for months, maybe even a year. He came to Ben & Jerry's in February 1995 and soon after began to clash with the forceful Cohen, who remains chairman and, along with Greenfield, still controls 42% of the company. Cohen denies any serious clashes. "That's not the way it felt to me," he says. He acknowledges that Holland's stint was short but says "changes in the marketplace" dictated his departure. Other insiders, though, say Cohen wasn't happy...
Holland was one of the few African Americans to head a publicly traded company. That brought both him and Ben & Jerry's a lot of useful visibility. Ben & Jerry's has long favored publicity stunts over traditional advertising. Not that choosing Holland was a publicity stunt--but the manner in which he was hired clearly was. The company staged an essay contest called "Yo! I want to be CEO." It attracted 22,000 applicants and was widely covered in the media. Holland did not enter. He was found through a blue-chip search firm...