Word: successors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...board itself had been split since last summer over what to do about a successor for Griffiths. His messy firing in June 1980 of his own heir apparent, Maurice Valente, who had been brought into the company only six months earlier from a top job at ITT, had angered several outside directors. Their dismay merely intensified when Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, chairman of NBC, RCA's network subsidiary, was let go in even clumsier fashion a few weeks later...
...Corp. In the past six years, the diversified broadcasting and electronics giant (1980 sales: $8 billion) has stumbled from one management fiasco to the next. These included: the awkward ousting of the son of the company's founder from his job as chairman; the dumping of his successor for failing to file his income taxes; the dismissal of a company president after only six months on the job; the firing of a network chairman who publicly refused to quit...
...presided over much of the pandemonium, RCA Chairman Edgar Griffiths, 59, is himself leaving, effective July 1. The announcement of Griffiths' departure took place during another painfully familiar management and public relations muddle. Griffiths' successor will be Atlantic Richfield (Arco) President Thornton Bradshaw, 63, an outside director on RCA's board since...
...member board of directors, Griffiths' accomplishments eventually counted for little when weighed against his shortcomings as a manager of people. Instead of grooming his successor, a task that any corporate head must unavoidably confront as retirement approaches, Griffiths permitted the matter to languish unresolved. The result was a power vacuum that was soon filled by cabals of jockeying, maneuvering subordinates. Lamented one source close to the firm last week: "If you put two people together at this company, you will have three factions...
Though it was clear that a successor was desperately needed, the board had no hope of finding one from within the backbiting ranks of the company's top management. As an alternative, a committee of outside members, led by Donald Smiley, the recently retired head of Macy's, launched its own search. Says one member: "No insiders at the company were ever involved. They're the most highly politicized group you can imagine, and the infighting was absolutely terrible. If we brought any one of them in, we would have had to contend with all those factions...