After nearly a year off for reflection, the one thing Lee Jennings wants to make clear is that he hasn`t retired.
Beyond that, the 57-year-old former managing partner of Peat Marwick in Chicago is wrestling with what has to be one of the most intriguing job searches underway in the city.
Jennings, you will recall, was unceremoniously dumped by the Big Eight accounting firm last March after he made some honest but apparently undiplomatic public remarks about some planned cutbacks at the firm.
A man who counts among his friends the chief executives of a good slice of Chicago`s major corporations suddenly found himself unemployed, apart from several civic and cultural engagements that fall to men who have reached his stature in any community. He said then he wouldn`t rush into anything, but would take a year or so to think about what his role in Chicago business should be.
We met with Jennings last week and found that he`s eager to get his hand back in, but is unsure how to proceed. Jennings believes he`s ”selling 30 years of looking at major corporations, good boards and bad boards, good managements and bad managements and everything in between.” The problem is how to sell that, especially when he`s considered retired in many eyes. ”And the less they see of me, the more retired I`m going to be,” he admitted.
”You don`t really care if the rest of the world thinks you`re retired if it doesn`t change the options open to you,” he noted. But his visibility in the last year admittedly has been low. ”I self-imposed a lot of that,” he conceded. ”I turned down a lot of things I could have pursued.”
Not that Jennings has been sitting on his hands. He`s joined some corporate boards, including Northwest National Bank`s. In addition, he`s on Mayor Harold Washington`s financial planning committee. He has been an informal adviser to some former clients from Peat.
Jennings is looking for a more formal outlet for his experience and energy. A stumbling block could be people`s conclusions about his ouster from Peat. ”Everybody concluded that I was either sicker than I was (he had undergone surgery shortly before he was fired) or the office was worse off than it was. Pride, I guess, dictates that you`d like the world to know that neither conclusion was correct.”
But he isn`t interested in a post-mortem on his Peat career. ”I think there`s a feeling on the part of a lot of people who didn`t know the firm, or me, that there was more to it–either there was an `Eastern bloc` (that wanted to get rid of him) or there was some performance problem. There wasn`t anything to it.”
Jennings` termination agreement precludes his taking any job that would put him in direct competition with Peat, but other than that his former firm plays no role in his deliberations, he said.
So far, he`s only clear about what he doesn`t want to do. He ruled out buying a company or taking a management job at someone else`s company. ”I reached the conclusion that I was not going to ever be an employee. That was my mentality, and it was too late in my life to change that part of me. I`ve spent all my adult life either advising management or managing. That`s what I really know how to do.”
With Jennings officially ready to return to business, it surely won`t be long before we know what that business will be.
Main office`s loss,
Chicago office`s gain
Speaking of high-level shuffles at national accounting firms, the one undertaken by KMG Main Hurdman will trim its executive ranks by about 10 percent, but put the Chicago office up by one. Howard Zodikoff, who has been the firm`s director of human resources, becomes managing partner of the Midwest region. Other than that, ”nothing changes in the Chicago office,”
said Cecil W. Bybee, partner in charge here.
Japanese press hints
Bush-Thompsonslate
Gov. James Thompson`s views on the U.S.-Japan trade issue have made him a popular American political figure in Japan. According to The Tribune`s Tokyo corespondent, recent Japanese news stories suggest that Thompson will join Vice President George Bush on the Republican presidential ticket in 1988. Not so, says the guv, who is once again on a Far East swing to drum up business for the state.
”News of a Bush-Thompson ticket would be as much news to the vice president as to me,” Thompson said Friday at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo. ”Although that is a flattering prospect, I don`t see it becoming a reality.”
