Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter one, corporate news. Chapter two, financial insecurity. Chapter three, hey, let's run away and join a band, huh?
Huh?
From American Public Media, this is Market Plans. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdell. It is Tuesday today. This one is the 3rd of February. Good as always. Have you along, everybody. This is a day ripe in news of the corporate variety. And you will be forgiven if you're thinking you've heard our lead story before. Disney CEO Bob Iger has decided he's going to step down. Again.
Yes, this would indeed be Iger's second retirement in the past six-ish years. He came back from the first one in 2022, but, you know, bygones. Josh DeMauro is the new guy.
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Chapter 2: What corporate news is impacting Disney's leadership?
Been with the company 28 years, most recently running the company's theme parks, whence, as we mentioned yesterday, most of Disney's profits come. Point is, though, House of Mouse is in a long line of companies, nonprofits, even big league sports franchises that have stumbled when leadership tries to pass the baton. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes gets us going with why succession is so hard.
Choosing a CEO has higher stakes than almost any other decision a company's directors will ever make. But boards don't get the chance to do it that often because good leaders tend to stay put. It's not uncommon to see tenures upwards of 10, 15, getting to 20 years. Yo-Jed Chang is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia.
She says when succession planning is done well, a board gets to know people at the company who could become their next leader. So that could be having dinners with executives around board meetings. It could be having individuals in the firm to come in to do presentations with the board. You want to have someone who's ready to take on the role when it's time.
But Chang says you don't want to anoint them too soon. If everyone in the firm sees like, okay, this is the next person, oftentimes talented people will leave. And go try to be a CEO somewhere else. Another potential stumbling block, when the current CEO gets a little too involved with the process. Deb Rubin is a senior partner at the leadership consulting firm, RHR.
It is hard for a CEO to be completely objective about the next phase and who should be there and what their own shadow has been in the organization. And so they are an important input, but they should not be the primary driver. Rubin says the board needs to think about choosing a leader, not just for the company that exists now, but for the company that will exist in the future.
There's a tendency to want to hire a clone if the last CEO has been tremendously successful, and to hire the opposite if a CEO has basically failed. And the reality is it's somewhere in between. The day that a new CEO takes charge, the company should start planning for its next one, says Anthony Nyberg, who leads the Center for Executive Succession at the University of South Carolina.
But he says the boards he talks to tend to put off those discussions. Because we're human, it's hard to have conversations with people about your successor. They often don't want to think about when their end might be. A CEO's identity is intertwined with that of the firm, says UVA's Yo-Jed Chang. So you're not just choosing a good leader, you're choosing the next face of the company.
I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace.
Disney shares down just a hair today, about two-tenths percent. More broadly, big tech took a bit of a whacking. We will have the details when we do the numbers. Corporate story number two comes to us from the food and beverage aisle by way of the snack counter. PepsiCo reported profits this morning. Did quite fine, thanks.
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Chapter 3: What challenges are companies facing in CEO succession planning?
Andy Samberg for Hellman's. And there's a reason for that.
Taking a side and making a big stand about what you stand for is very, very difficult at this moment.
Sean McBride is chief creative officer at Arnold, a global ad agency.
And we don't quite know what to do. And so I think it seems like people have settled on, OK, celebrity.
Traditionally, advertisers have settled on patriotism. But nothing's really safe these days. It's why Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern, says we might see more traditional ads. A bit of a blunt, hey, we make this great thing. You should buy it. We will see advertisers, by and large, stay very close to the product.
Calkins says, more than usual, we're also seeing brands run commercials early, right now, before the big events.
If you have a problem in your Super Bowl ad, it is much better to learn about it before the game rather than after the game when you just showed it to 100 million people or more.
About 130 million people last year, actually. A record. They're why brands are paying as much as $10 million for 30 seconds of airtime this year. Ross Benesch, a senior analyst at eMarketer, says as viewing habits have become more fragmented, live events have become more important for advertisers.
whether like you're watching in California or in New York or wherever, you got everyone experiencing the same ad at the same time. Which is sort of the opposite of what advertising is these days, tailored and targeted. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.
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Chapter 4: How is PepsiCo addressing rising consumer costs?
And then you got to tear it all down and do it again the next day.
Right. Do it the next day in a city 400 miles away. Let me ask you the labor force question, though, right? Because that's what caught our eye about this piece. Of course. In the vernacular, they are roadies, but they are, it turns out, I learned from reading this piece, so much more than that. They're technicians, they're drone operators, they're construction people. And it's booming, honestly.
Yes. The industry was sort of confronted with an issue of roadie brain drain, right? a few years ago, like classically roadies would stick around with the same artist forever. When COVID hit, a bunch of these roadies retired and suddenly the industry was like, oh my gosh, we need more people and we need it fast. So the industry had the struggle to let people know that these jobs existed.
And not only that, that if they wanted those jobs, They might need to think about doing some specialized training while they were still in school. And when I say school, I also mean like things like trade school. It's not just like these are good jobs that you don't need a college degree for.
How good am I? Am I making seventy five? I'm making one hundred thousand dollars.
I believe that the starting salary for a lot of these roles is like 60. But you have to remember, your expenses are lower because you are on the road with a band. You're not paying rent. You are eating, you know, catering every day. And I believe one person whose talk I went to at the roadie career day at Rock Lidditz said,
said that her husband started at something in that range and ended up making, quote, exorbitant amounts of money.
It was interesting to me that the CEO of Rocklet, with whom you spoke, characterized these as careers in live entertainment. I mean, they're sexy-ish jobs, right?
Yeah.
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