James Cannavino, who on Friday stepped down after one year as president and chief executive officer at Perot Systems Corp, has apparently resigned due to lack of enthusiasm for the job. A spokesperson for the company said that Cannavino, who spent a year as president before becoming CEO, is a vision guy – good at mapping out the future and attracting the people to make it happen. But he isn’t much for numbers, meetings and the other things that go with the territory. Perot Systems has undergone significant change over the past two years, as it moved away from its earlier incarnation as an Electronic Data Systems Corp look-alike and more toward consulting services. Cannavino was instrumental in those changes and the company has doubled its revenues in his two-year tenure, but now someone has to make sense of what we’ve done and, according to the company source, that kind of work bores Cannavino and thus impedes his ability to do it well. It’s like the builder leaving and the decorator moving in. With a string of acquisitions and the new business it has brought, Perot needs to focus on its financial situation and organize itself strategically and Cannavino would sooner spend hours talking to programmers than sitting in meetings or poring over the balance sheet. For now, those duties fall back into the lap of Mort Meyerson, former CEO and current chairman, who will be holding down the fort until the search for a new chief is successful.
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