There have been many high-profile examples of executives feuding. Photo / Getty Images
There have been many high-profile examples of executives feuding. Photo / Getty Images
In the upper echelons of big business, security paranoia and corporate ego go hand in hand. A whole industry of intelligence consultants, private eyes, security experts and vendors of high-end kit exists to cater to both.
"Security" is one of the ways chief executives justify their corporate jet — ortwo corporate jets in the case of Jeffrey Immelt, the former General Electric boss, who occasionally took a spare plane with him on business trips. Which senior manager would not feel a surge of power being preceded out of a customised SUV by burly men with shades and earpieces urgently whispering, "The eagle has landed", as he or she arrives for the quarterly sales conference?
I suspect that in the same way that chaos or coincidence is usually a better explanation than conspiracy, much of the corporate security rigmarole is expensively superfluous, more Johnny English than James Bond. Certainly, if executives appreciated the absurdity of some of their antics, they would be better, and humbler, managers.
Take the dispute playing out at Credit Suisse between chief executive Tidjane Thiam and Iqbal Khan, who quit as head of the bank's wealth management business in July. The bank hired private eyes from a firm with the cartoonish name Investigo to trail Mr Khan, suspecting he might try to poach other bankers for his move to rival Swiss bank UBS. Mr Khan alleged he was chased through Zurich, by car and on foot. An Investigo gumshoe claimed, on the contrary, he was chased by Mr Khan.
A mission that promised delicate spycraft and clandestine surveillance seems to have culminated instead, according to Mr Khan's account, in an embarrassingly public
Keystone Cops-style physical confrontation in the shadow of the Swiss National Bank. It is undeniable that high-pressure, high-profile, highly paid executive roles can come with their share of genuine threat, rising from hacking and industrial espionage to actual bodily harm.
Alfred Herrhausen, Deutsche Bank chief executive, was assassinated by a roadside bomb in 1989, despite travelling in an armoured Mercedes. Jorge Paulo Lemann, founder of 3G, the private equity group behind Kraft Heinz and AB InBev, moved permanently to Switzerland from Brazil after gunmen tried to kidnap his three youngest children in 1999.
Rupert Murdoch has been a stickler for security ever since a botched attempt to kidnap his then wife Anna in 1969 led to the murder of the wife of one of his senior executives — a saga at the centre of the West End play Ink.
Rupert Murdoch takes his personal security very seriously. Photo / Getty Images
The fear provoked by rare incidents such as these tends to trickle down the corporate hierarchy. The chief executive of a medium-sized UK business once pleaded with me not to publish the precise details of his weekly schedule because it would reveal the one night a week that he regularly spent away from home and could put his wife and children at risk of burglary or kidnap.
It is hard for outside observers to assess how serious such dangers are and how far companies should go to prevent them. There are sound commercial reasons why Credit Suisse was prepared to take measures to secure its lucrative wealth management franchise following Mr Khan's departure. But while Mr Thiam and the younger Mr Khan are both proud, talented and successful financial executives, paid more than most, they were also indulging in the sort of petty personal rivalry instantly recognisable to the rest of us. That this tension was allowed to bubble up so furiously and damagingly speaks to a failure of management and supervision, for which Credit Suisse's chairman Urs Rohner and board should take part of the blame.
Deliciously, Khan and Thiam's feud frothed over into their home lives. Mr Khan moved next door to his boss and they allegedly fell out over, among other things, the younger man's noisy building work and some trees that Mr Thiam had planted on his property. In other words, this was the stuff of banal but often bitter neighbourhood disputes the world over, whether on Lake Zurich's luxurious "Gold Coast", where the two men lived, or on some ordinary cul-de-sac in middle America.
Khan is now on gardening leave ahead of a move to UBS. (If Investigo's spies are at a loose end, they may wish to listen out for the sound of revving chainsaws on a weekday morning in the vicinity of Mr Thiam's property.)
Credit Suisse has told staff that the media reports have "sensationalised both facts and events". Perhaps that is true. Downplay the overexcited coverage of spies and car chases, though, and this story boils down to a mundane tale of two men bickering over suburban shrubbery. Other managers should remember how unseemly that looks before they allow overblown, ego-driven personal antipathy to rock their organisations.
