Sallie Mae: Are You With Us, Lord?

It was one thing when DealBreaker's Bess Levin had a good cackle about it a several days ago. But things got far more serious when the NYT's Adrew Ross Sorkin capped his year-end deal-making summary piece yesterday by explicitly raising the question -- will Sallie Mae's Albert Lord survive long in his second tenure as CEO?

Sorkin closed this way:

Mr. Lord, you didn't help yourself any with one of the most mystifying and embarrassing conference calls with shareholders in years. Your defensive blustering on the call made it clear why the negotiations were so fraught, and frankly made Mr. Flowers look all the more reasonable for walking away. Punctuating the call with an expletive didn't help, either.

The last time a C.E.O. held a call that demonstrated such hubris, his name was Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. You joked during your call that metal detectors might be needed at the next shareholder meeting. Al, I hate to end the dinner on a sour note, but the real question is whether you'll be there at all.

While Lord's individual foibles and SLM's massive struggles have understandably prompted murmurs about the CEO's job security, the temperature of the pot always goes up a notch when that speculation is actually voiced by a major news player. Once that ice is broken, all other media can reference the speculation, and the "embattled" adjective is coldly tacked to the CEO's forehead.

In this case, the explicit speculation was inevitable, as Lord's conference call performance served as a clanging alarm that the top guy just might be cracking under the pressure. And Sorkin is not the first to offer the "worst-call-since-Skilling" assessment, a tag that is just too memorable not to stick. So, while many CEOs are criticized for clinging to boring scripts, the Lord experience shows just exactly how risky it can be when a CEO actually let's it all hang out on a conference call.

The fragility of Lord's job is tough to handicap, given that he's so new to the CEO seat, and yet so completely entwined with the missteps that got Sallie Mae into its current predicament. Finger to the wind, Jack Flack pegs Lord currently at the third rung of the Five Levels of CEO Media Hell.

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