C.E.O. Sinecures

Perhaps the real lesson that Willie Randolph, the fired manager of the New York Mets, could have learned from America's top corporate chieftains is that short-term performance matters only in sports.

C.E.O.'s are increasingly able to entrench themselves in the corner office even as the companies' stock price slumps and shareholder activists bay for management blood.

A survey of the world's 2,500 largest public corporations by the consulting firm Booz & Co. has found that that there is little correlation between poor short-term shareholder performance and dismissals of chief executives over a 10-year period.

The average rate of a C.E.O. getting fired for poor performance was only 2.1 percent. Even chief executives whose companies' stock price fell by 25 percent or more over a two-year period had only a 5.7 percent chance of getting the ax.

The rate of C.E.O. turnover overall fell to 13.8 percent last year, from 14.3 percent in 2006 and 15.4 percent in 2005. Booz & Co. attributes the decline to fewer mergers and thus fewer merger-related departures.

One surprising finding in the study is that boards of European companies -- often seen as stodgier and more bureaucratic than their American counterparts -- are much more likely to boot out their chieftains.

The overall C.E.O. turnover rate in Europe was 17.6 percent, higher also than Japan at 10.6 percent and the rest of the world, 9.1 percent. This is largely because there is a higher rate of planned succession than elsewhere in the world, the study says.

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