A dearth of CEO talent. Really?

IS banker Datuk Tajuddin Atan, ex-boss of RHB Capital Bhd, an exceptional candidate to head Bursa Malaysia Bhd?
If you pause or shrug your shoulder, it could mean less that Tajuddin is a poor choice but more of this - if a candidate whose professional track record is not glaringly relevant to the new job as head of the stock exchange, could we then be choosing less than the best available candidate?
Bursa Malaysia needs to do a great deal of heavy lifting to woo quality companies, local and foreign, to list on its platform amidst an extraordinary global wave of exchange mergers promising to crank up competition. That’s also the unfinished job left behind by his predecessor Datuk Yusli Mohamed Yusoff.
Can an individual from a different field fill these gaps? Can Bursa afford to have a CEO with a resume, impressive nevertheless, which suggests he knows very little about marketing a stock exchange, courting investors/companies, cracking down on misconduct and creating a robust liquid trading platform? And does Bursa have the luxury, in an environment bursting with competition, for its CEO to be learning on the job?
(Note: Tajuddin may well outperform expectations but that’s really not the point of this column).
Tan Sri Zarinah Anwar’s term as the Securities Commission chairman, it is believed, will be extended by one year come April.
And if market wags are to be believed, Zarinah had wanted to step down but instead, was asked to stay on as the search for a successor had been in vain.
That throws up more questions.
Is our top talent pool so thin that those in a position to decide on such high-profile appointments have to keep wading in the same waters?
Zarinah’s term expires end March but there’s nary an official word on that. On the other hand, in Hong Kong, things are vastly different.
The CEO search for Hong Kong’s Securities & Futures Commission has begun with admirable openness - the selection panel recently put out an ad in the South China Morning Post on the global search for a CEO, both local and foreign, five months before the departure of its current CEO Martin Wheatley. Wheatley, who had worked with the London Stock Exchange for 18 years, will end his six-year tenure with the Hong Kong market regulator in June this year.
In Singapore, the recruitment process for the top seat of its stock exchange SGX, literally walks the extra mile, casting its net far and wide for a suitable candidate. In mid 2009, Swede Magnus Bocker, who was prior to that the executive vice-president of Nasdaq OMX Group, which owns and operates the Nasdaq stock market and seven European stock exchanges in the Nordic and Baltic regions, was appointed to helm the exchange which is Asia’s second largest listed bourse.
On the other hand, there is also the argument that one need not look that far in the CEO hunt and that there could be potential successors within the organisation.
“The best internal candidates often aren’t broadly known outside the company, but that doesn’t mean they should be discarded. Such a candidate is often greeted with a yawn and perhaps even disappointment from outside the company, but goes on to great success,” Professor Joseph Grundfest, a former commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission had reportedly said some time back, when asked to comment on the dearth of CEO talent on Wall Street.
Executive search firm Egon Zehnder International provides the flipside (in an article posted on its website): “Internal candidates have been promoted and evaluated on the basis of their performance, not their potential. Their experiences and their accomplishments, no matter how impressive, simply may not be relevant to what the company will need most.”
Malaysia, with a much-trumpeted aspiration to turn itself into a high-income nation and plan to draw talent back into the country, needs to seriously assess the way it scours the landscape for suitable candidates to head prominent institutions, including government-linked companies. It is not that the choices are flawed, but merely that they are perceivably, not a result of an exhaustive hunt.

* Business editor Anita Gabriel understands that the search for CEOs or those in top spots can be exasperating. But there exists a nagging suspicion that apart from merit and virtue, there are other over riding factors limiting the hunt.