It's heartening to see someone looking after the oldies. The over 55s that is. But we don't really mean just any old oldies. We're talking about those few former senior executives, usually chief executives, who don't feel quite as loyal to their previous employer as say, former GE chief Jack Welsh and his soon-to-be-former wife did. One company is snapping up the bosses who have been down-sized, restructured and otherwise put out to pasture before their time. As well as those who leap (voluntarily) from the lofty heights at the top of the corporate tree in favour of one of those rare Hong Kong commodities known as 'a life'. There's got to be at least a couple of them around. Roger Ho, managing director of Executive Interim Management (EIM), says they are interested in the 50 to 55-year-old executives that head-hunters cannot find permanent jobs for. 'They can't handle them, but we can,' laughs Mr Ho, who sounds like he handles them with the skill of a cattle rancher, as he cracks his whip and sends them off to head one company after another. 'They are quite a different breed, these guys,' Mr Ho agrees. Although we didn't get the bloodlines, he confirmed they weren't all men: 20 per cent of the 400 temporary executive managers he has on the books in Asia are women. One example is an executive of Dutch heritage with decades of experience in Asia who has just taken the reins of a warring joint-venture in the textile industry, an increasingly common demand from the increasing number of warring foreign and Chinese joint venture partners. But Mr Ho maintains his temporary executives do more than manage crises. Often they are brought in for business succession purposes, when an outsider can hold the fort before the heir to the throne is ready. to take over a family company. 'We go against traditional wisdom and put people in who go down the ladder, rather than up, and they love it,' which means EIM 'goes for overkill', by placing a person with experience running a big company into a smaller one. So what makes these fly-by-night bosses so different from your average permanent CEO, CFO, or COO, or any other person important enough to have a title described by seemingly random alphabetical combinations? According to Mr Ho, it's the ego. The executives on his books aren't doing it for the money. If they're already retired, they're doing it to keep the grey matter occupied and pass on their experience. If they're younger, they're secure enough in their own skills that they don't need the fancy job title or prestigious company name. They just want a new challenge. So the point is this: if you're an overpaid executive contemplating the next few years as a run-up to retirement, be afraid, be very afraid. It could be time to start saying good morning a bit more often (come on, it wouldn't kill you), or your staff members might decide to cut costs by replacing you with a temp. Big bids for Becks: Two former China-focused dotcom entrepreneurs either have very big hearts, very big soccer addiction problems, very big tax problems and/or very annoyed wives after they paid HK$50,000 each for a shirt signed by David Beckham and a football signed by Manchester United's three-times victorious team at a charity auction held over two nights at Delaney's last week. But those bids only nudged the HK$85,000 winning bid for a shirt signed by the England team who played Portugal in the last 'friendly', as well as by match absentees David Beckham and Paul Scholes. The unidentified male English bidder - who at the time was labelled by kind observers as 'a little under the weather' - made good on his promise with a decent deposit immediately after the auction, according to the event organiser, commercial litigator and sports promoter Barry Hoy. The fans ended up raising HK$460,000 for the souvenirs donated by former Liverpool striker John Barnes. Half of the money goes to a British charity, with the rest going to The Rainbow Project, a local school for autistic children. Graphic: whee16gbz
