Marsh & McLennan To Replace CEO

Insurance broker Marsh & McLennan has decided to boot its CEO, Michael Cherkasky, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Chairman Stephen Hardis said the insurance broker's 2007 results have "fallen far short of our expectations. The board has taken this performance into account, and listened to concerns raised by some of the company's largest shareholders in recent quarters, in making this change."

But, in a stunningly insane move, the board is keeping Cherkasky on until a successor is found. Am I purely stupid, or is this one of the more foolish things a board could have done? When an employee is being fired, rarely does the company keep the employee on, at least in a functional role, until the replacement is in. The action creates enormous resentment in the employee (who may be tempted to cause havoc), it's disheartening to the rest of the company, and potential replacements have to be thinking not just twice, but three times whether it makes sense to join a company that would do something so screwy. When the position is that of the CEO, this rises to a potential fiasco.

According to the same short report I received by email, Cherkasky first came on in 2004 when then-NY state attorney general Elliot Spitzer sued the company:

alleging the company steered unsuspecting clients to insurers with whom it had lucrative payoff agreements, and that the firm solicited rigged bids for insurance contracts.

Was the board irritated that the new CEO couldn't get the same results as conniving could? Or did it figure that major credit upheavals weren't interesting enough, and so it would keep as an interim CEO the person it thought should be sent packing for poor performance?