Mid-size consulting firm that specializes in evaluation

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Reference no: EM132167412

You are one of five partners and a vice-president in Performance Evaluation, Ltd. (PEL), a mid-size consulting firm that specializes in evaluation, assessment and engineering analysis. Your firm’s chief clients are the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. EPA, and various state government energy and environmental agencies. Most of your work involves technical and policy analysis, prospective and retrospective. Illustrative recent projects include: (1) a major three-year study estimating the cost and available technologies for cleaning up hazardous waste at Idaho National Energy Engineering Lab (a DOE facility); (2) assistance in the EPA Superfund in developing its Congressionally-mandated performance plan as part of its GPRA documents; (3) an evaluation of the effectiveness of energy technology transfer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Your firm is only 15 years old. It started as a two-person consulting firm, a partnership between a brother and sister, one (Randall Brown) a doctoral level economist, the other (Lucinda Brown) a master’s level environmental engineer. The firm began with one small contract performed by the two partners, but has grown to more than 300 professional employees and $23 million of contracts in place at present. PEL has reinvested in the business, having built a new building four years ago in Arlington, Virginia (cost $17 million) and having developed significant infrastructure, chiefly information technology.

The forty-three year old company President and C.E.O, Randall Brown, has just retired, taking along a $12 million golden parachute. His sister Lucinda will be the new president, but everyone agrees that she is not cut out to be the C.E.O. Her strength is technical work, not strategic management or finance and she certainly does not have the personality, as Randall does, to be the organizational “rain-maker.” Nearly all the contracts attracted to date have been the work of Randall.

PEL is hiring a new C.E.O. and is committed to going outside the firm. Most of the people in the firm have skills similar to Lucinda’s, not Randall’s. The need is for an entrepreneurial manager, but, of course, the C.E.O. must have many other skills to help the organization succeed and grow.

You are one of four people on the committee to recruit a new CEO. Your committee just met and identified a number of concerns. These include: (1) a cutback in the federal budget for DOE and EPA, (2) a new competitor organization that is a spin-off from the RAND corporation, (3) others are thinking about taking Randall’s path – cashing out their stocks and equity, (4) PEL may have over-extended itself with the new building and capital purchases, (5) there is talk about moving from Beltway work to foreign contracts, but no one has international work experience, (6) a key employee (one of the partners) has just filed a sexual harassment suit against the firm, and (7) the contract with Idaho lab was underbid and costs are spinning out of control.

QUESTION ( LEADERSHIP CLASS)

With this situation in mind, your committee has decided that a next step is to identify a list of the leadership attributes desired for the C.E.O. and to set priorities among them. List the leadership characteristics you wish for a C.E.O. and rank them in order of importance as a committee member. Please specify why certain attributes are important given the context of PEL and provide reasons for your rankings.

Reference no: EM132167412

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