Letters To The Editor:  Sun At The Top

Several of our subscribers wrote in to say, you left something out of your Sun article – where is the part about all the executives who left/are leaving, especially Ed Zanders?  Putting all the questions together, here are some of our thoughts.

It’s not that we didn’t know it had happened – we were, of course, on the McNealy/Zanders phone call and had read with some interest the previous news release and articles on the Sun reorganization and “exodus.”  In fact, a few of the rearrangements were commented on in last week’s article.  But not, we agree, anything on the subject of “what’s going on here?”

So:

1. While it’s possible for so many executives to simultaneously develop wanderlust or discover they’d rather be doing something else, it’s a big coincidence.  We think there’s likely to be some underlying cause.  In fact, we believe that cause might be Sun’s recent poor results and the resulting turmoil.  It’s clear that a real turnaround could take years, not a quarter.
   
    

2. After every major reorganization, in any big company, there are winners and losers.  Some of the folks who didn’t get what they wanted or thought they deserved – or who just don’t like the new arrangements – decide this is a good time to do something else.  This is neither particularly unusual nor particularly troubling – it just is. 
   
    

3. As a May 2^nd article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/02SUN.html)  makes clear, part of this exodus is probably due to McNealy’s strong (some would say overwhelming) management style.  According to that article, Zander, who certainly managed to maintain a good working relationship with the notoriously hot-blooded Sun founder and chairman for a very long time (more than 15 years), apparently has been thinking about ending his career with a CEO position and had decided McNealy would never give up that spot at Sun.  He’s remarked both in the press briefing on his plans and in the NYT article that while he isn’t sure what he might do next, being CEO at another company could be a possibility, but he wouldn’t leave Sun until it was in good shape.  He thinks July 1, the end of the fiscal year, will be a good time to move into a less high profile role.

Sun does have lots of experienced executives left (they run, as the sports-oriented McNealy would say, a deep bench), but we can’t imagine that losing five top guys in such a short time frame, especially when there’s so much to do, is a good thing.  Unless:

	McNealy has plans for Sun they disagreed with and couldn’t support; or
	McNealy felt that they had given Sun what they had to contribute and it was time for new, younger blood; or
	There was so much bad feeling over the “blame game” played around the bad results and how to recover and reorient that some of the Sun executives could no longer function effectively

Maybe none of those things are true – in which case it’s that much harder to understand why so many good guys are leaving at this time.

Once the newly reorganized team has a chance to regroup, offer a new plan, and begin to execute, some of why this happened is likely to become clearer.  Frankly, we’re more interested in what Sun intends to do in the future than in why some of their veterans left.

Amy Wohl

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