CEO casualties: a battlefront report.

• Author: Lyons, Denis B.K.
• Position: Includes related article on CEO compensation - Trends in CEO tenure

Forewarned is forearmed -- here are some classic storm signals which might indicate serious trouble ahead for an incumbent CEO.

YOU ARE THE CEO of a Fortune 100 company. You are 58. You have been in the corner office for seven years. But don't get too comfortable in that leather chair ... your time might nearly be up.

Recent CEO departures, as well as a string of CEO tenure surveys, highlight the harsh reality that life at the top is tough -- and getting tougher. A few facts:

-- Today's CEOs are younger than their counterparts 20 years ago;

-- They have spent less time with the company they are leading; and

-- Their tenure as CEO is shrinking.

A recent Spencer Stuart study showed that the average tenure as CEO at Fortune 100 companies is seven years, and that the number of Fortune 100 CEOs with tenure of five years or less had risen to 58% in 1998 from 46% in 1980. The average age of Fortune 100 CEOs dropped from 59 in 1980 to 58 in 1998, with 13% having spent less than a total of five years (as CEO and in any other positions they had held) at their current company, compared with only 3% in 1980.

Another study of Fortune 100 companies last year showed that nearly a third of the organizations had changed CEOs since 1995, with one-fifth of them changing CEOs in 1997 alone.

Parade of departures

The bottom line is that the increasingly challenging and risky task of leading the modern corporation has left the corporate battlefront littered with many high-profile casualties in recent years.

Within the last year, the parade of top-level departures has included Frank Biondi, chairman and CEO of Universal Studios Inc.; Ken Burenga, president and COO of Dow Jones & Co.; David Coulter, president of BankAmerica Corp.; Jamie Dimon, president of Citigroup; Albert J. Dunlap, CEO of Sunbeam Corp.; Walter Forbes, chairman of Cendant Corp.; and, most recently, Eckhard Pfeiffer, CEO of Compaq Computer Corp.

Moreover, this phenomenon has not been confined to the U.S. Last year also saw the departure of Martin Taylor, chief executive of Barclays, Britain's second biggest bank, and, earlier this year, German luxury carmaker BMW ousted its management board chairman, Bernd Pischetsrieder, and his heir apparent, Wolfgang Reitzle.

The rash of leadership changes across virtually every sector has been accelerated by several factors. For example, increasingly independent boards are clearly becoming more impatient and decisive in dealing with underperformance. On the S&P 500 boards, more than three-quarters of the directors are outsiders and for nearly a quarter of the S&P 500 the CEO is the sole insider director, according to the latest Spencer Stuart Board Index.

This shift in the ratio of...