Rather than hobnobbing with politicians and courting the press, these outperformers are embodying... The diminishing allure of

Rather than hobnobbing with politicians and courting the press, these outperformers are embodying old-fashioned ideals such as hard work, team-building and humility. Call them the strong, silent types.

Many management experts cite promotional guru Ms. Fiorina as the quintessential media darling, who resisted selling off poorly performing business units while embracing company pep rallies and press conferences.

That new CEO, Mr. Hurd, is known as an operations-minded type who shuns the corner office for a Dilbert-style cubicle and is more comfortable in front of a spreadsheet than a camera.

The growing appreciation for under-the-radar CEOs is gaining momentum from recent research proving that companies with chief executives who hog the spotlight are no more likely to outperform the market than their peers. In many cases, celebrity status can be a marker for poor performance.

In a paper published in May entitled "Superstar CEOs," Ulrike Malmendier of Stanford University and Geoffrey Tate of the University of Pennsylvania tracked the performance of hundreds of U.S. companies with CEOs who had garnered prestigious national awards from publications such as Forbes and Time between 1975 and 2002.

Jim Fisher, associate dean and professor of leadership and strategy at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, says the "absolutely astounding compensation packages" of celebrity CEOs tend to be "out of hand" with those of others on the management team, who, in many cases, deserve a comparable amount of credit.

James Hamilton, a professor of public policy at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and his colleague, Richard Zeckhauser at Harvard University, have been studying media coverage of CEOs embroiled in scandals in the early part of this decade.

Their research, yet to be published, has found that 20 per cent of CEOs generated 80 per cent of the media coverage, yet with no statistically significant difference in average shareholder returns between companies led by such celebrities and similar companies based on industry sector and sales.

Moreover, a curious fact the researchers did discover was that executives who generate "soft" news stories associated with celebrity -- namely articles containing words such as "personality," "married," "charities," "hobbies," "husband" and "wife" -- were more likely than their peers to be charged later with breaching regulations or misusing company resources. "When we looked at these guys pre-scandal, they seemed to be the type to court soft coverage," Prof. Hamilton says.

Among executives included in the study: convicted fraudsters Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco International Ltd., John Rigas of Adelphia Communications Corp. and Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom.

Jocelyn Bérard, managing director for DDI Canada, the Toronto-based arm of an international human resource consulting firm, says that while the concept of celebrity may have value in the entertainment world, it can be at odds with running a company.

Business watchers say the modern celebrity CEO phenomenon got its start with Lee Iacocca, the outspoken former chairman who turned around ailing car maker Chrysler Corp. in the early 1980s.

It continued with such popular figures as Canada's Matthew Barrett, the former boss of Bank of Montreal, and Michael Eisner, who recently left Walt Disney Co., and reached a peak with Jack Welch, who retired in 2001 from General Electric Co., a company that ironically was performing very well before him and continues to do well under new CEO, Jeffrey Immelt.

Rakesh Khurana, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, has examined performance at hundreds of major companies and says CEOs are given far too much credit for their companies' success. He says up to 30 per cent of a company's performance can usually be chalked up to broader industry conditions.

The second-biggest factor affecting performance is the overall economic environment, adds Prof. Khurana, author of Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs. All other things being equal, any company will tend to do better when the economy's strong. That economic lift is known to account for roughly 10 to 15 per cent of a company's performance.

Prof. Khurana says that, while CEOs can certainly have an impact on the bottom line, the media often exaggerate their value, a phenomenon now questioned by more and more experts and shareholders. "People have a more complex view of what affects firm performance," he says.

"Who has heard of John Lederer who runs Loblaws?" he asks, rhetorically. Among other CEOs he admires: Phil Orsino of Masonite International Corp. and Domenic D'Alessandro of Manulife Financial Corp.

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