Welcome to Work Shift. Has the anti-incumbent vibe that shook up the US election also made its way to the C-suite? Jo Constantz and Jeff Green examine the evidence.

‘Impossible’ job

It’s only Tuesday, and already this week has brought news of CEO departures at two iconic companies.

The resignations of Pat Gelsinger at Intel Corp. and Carlos Tavares at Stellantis NV raise questions not only about the strategic path each of these companies has been on, but whether anyone could design a better one — and stay long enough to see it through.

"The rapidity of change has never been greater," said Davia Temin, founder of New York crisis consultancy Temin & Co. "I think looking for somebody who's agile enough is getting to be an impossible job. In fact, arguably being a CEO is getting to be an impossible job."

It’s certainly a harder job to hold onto than it used to be. Among Russell 3000 companies, so far this year nearly three times as many chief executives have been forced out versus in 2017, according to exechange.com, which analyzes public sources to track executive changes and the circumstances around them.

Exechange.com scores CEO departures on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being totally voluntary and 10 being clearly fired. The average “push-out” score for the 285 CEO departures announced so far in 2024 is a 6.3, the highest on record. 

Gelsinger’s exit was rated a 10. The chipmaker sent him packing after the board lost confidence in his plans to win back market share and narrow the gap with Nvidia Corp.

Read more: Intel CEO Forced Out by Board Frustrated With Slow Progress

At Stellantis, which isn’t included in the exechange.com data because the automaker isn’t US-based, Tavares moved up his planned retirement by more than a year and resigned abruptly after clashing with the board over less-than-stellar sales numbers and a 46% year-to-date drop in the share price.

Read more: Jeep Owner Ditches Tough-Guy CEO With No Backup Plan in Place

Andrew Challenger of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., which also tracks CEO exits, said one factor behind the surge in turnover may be pent-up demand for change.

The firm found that right now, the average age and tenure of departing CEOs is higher than normal, which suggests that boards kept top executives in place for longer than usual in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. With things somewhat clearer now, Challenger said, “boards have more comfort making a decision about what the strategy's going to look like for a five-year period — and what kind of leader they need to bring in to do that.”

Whether that will make it easier for the next wave of CEOs to hold onto their jobs remains to be seen. —Jo Constantz and Jeff Green

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• Black Graduates Twice as Likely to Be Rejected for Top UK Jobs, Study Says
• Apple Sued for Spying on Employees, Restricting Their Speech
• Jane Street Says Ex-Trader Mocked ‘Dumb’ Millennium Strategies

One big number

Minding a new gender gap

Why are women so much less likely than men to use generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard? The reasons are manifold, ranging from the time pressures on women to their greater distrust of AI in general, as Josie Cox discovered in an essay for Bloomberg Weekend.

But she also turned up this surprising nugget: “At the end of November, Deloitte published a report that found the share of US women using or experimenting with generative AI had tripled in 2024 from the year prior, compared to a 2.2 times increase for men, which helped to narrow the gender gap. The authors made a bold prediction: Despite the persistent generative AI gender divide, women are poised to eclipse men in its use — as early as next year in some countries.”

For now, in the US at least, the divide remains stark.

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