IBM Corp has retained two executive search firms, Heidrick & Struggles Inc and Spencer Stuart Inc to identify and recommend candidates to be its new chief executive to the Nominating and Executive Compensation Committee of the IBM board. It says it took on two firms to ensure that the search process would produce as quickly as practicable the strongest possible list of candidates. If anyone were running a book on the succession, it looks as if Apple Computer Inc’s John Sculley would be among the favourites after a story in the Wall Street Journal that he bought a house in northern Greenwich, Connecticut, just across the state line from IBM’s headquarters, last September. Sculley backers also point out that he is due a sabbatical from Apple soon and has said that in such circumstances, people should go off leaving the company in a state to run without them, and that his wife is said to want to move back east.
