Not all comeback chiefs are as triumphant; what about Murthy?

It seems to be the comeback season.

Shinzo Abe is having his second go at being prime minister of Japan. Nawaz Sharif his third in Pakistan. And Jos Mourinho is set to return to manage Chelsea football club after a six-year absence.

Recently, JC Penney, a department-store chain, sacked its chief executive, Ron Johnson and brought back his predecessor, Myron “Mike” Ullman. Procter & Gamble, did the same by sacking its boss, Bob McDonald, and replacing him with his predecessor, AG Lafley.

And in India, on Saturday,NR Narayana Murthy returned to join Infosys as its Executive Chairman.

[caption id=“attachment_836885” align=“alignright” width=“380”] Reuters[/caption]

Though Murthy’s return cheered Infosys shares and they rose as much as 9.02 percent yesterday, the question on everybody’s mind is can Murthyrevive the company’s flagging fortunes?

No wonder, the initial euphoria has ended and the stock has slipped today. At 11.24 a.m, the stock was trading at2484.90, down1.16 percent.

According to an article in_ TheEconomist ,_several returning bosses do extremely well. Like when Apple’s board brought backSteve Jobs- the company never looked back as long as Jobs remained at the helm, coming up with iconic products starting with iMac, iTunes, iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.But there are good reasons to worry aboutthe comeback bosses.

For one, the return of the boss is a signal that that the company is in “deep doo-doo”,and often the mess they are brought back to fix is one they left behind. Also, the deals or strategies that they built in the past may have been brilliant then, but it may not be relevant any more.

“Calling back a boss is rather like calling back a plumber: something you do only in dire circumstances and with a bitter sense that he should have done the job properly in the first place. Even in cases where the old bosses left on a high, they went for a reason-because they had reached a certain age (Mr Lafley is 65) or wanted to spend more time playing golf. They will not necessarily apply the same energy to the job second time around,“ the article n otes.

And the examples of corporate failed returnees are quite a few.

Enron, an American energy, commodities, and services company crumbled in the hands of Kenneth Lay who returned as the CEO in 2001. Jerry Yang failed in his second innings as the Yahoo boss and Michael Dell has been battling to stem his company’s decline in his second incarnation as CEO.

Read The Economist article here.

As an earlier Firstpost article argued, Murthy’s pluck, and three dollops of luck, helped make Infosys a world-beating software company. In the 1990s, as India opened up, Murthy’s Infy was among the first companies to take advantage of a liberalised capital market and scale up. But, Infosys’ problems are completely different today.

Will Narayana Murthy do a Steve Jobs or will he become a Jerry Yang?Only time can tell.