Little attention and no respect.

• Position: Chief executive officers - Brief Article

HALF THE CEOs of large companies have been in their jobs for less than three years. In today's rapid-fire economy, a chief executive often is only as good as his last quarter. One strike may be all a CEO gets as evidenced by top-level turnover at Gillette, Lucent Technologies, and Xerox.

CEOs of smaller companies may not be playing in one-strike games; however, they may not be playing in the big leagues either. Instead, they are relegated to the sandlots where small-cap, low-liquidity, Old Economy companies play before few fans, with little fanfare.

We have been in a bull market for 18 years. The current market is being driven by a relatively small number of companies as illustrated by public company P/Es whose median is 14 -- but whose average is 21. This disparity in the marketplace derives from very high valuations for a select few stocks.

The majority of stocks have not enjoyed the market run-up. During these good times, they have stayed put. With much of America's equity owned by large financial institutions, most small and many mid-cap companies cannot compete because they do not offer sufficient liquidity to enable these large funds to enter and exit easily.

CEOs had expected their share price to be correlated to performance, but even with ever-increasing quarter-by-quarter results, their shares have languished. Predictability used to be a generator of premiums. Today, Wall Street does not care much about a small-cap's...