Auf Wiedersehen, Joe

Ackermann/Deutsche: Josef Ackermann postponed his departure from Deutsche Bank once, and now that he is to give up being chief executive, he is in line to chair the supervisory board. Ackermann would be wrong for the job.

A chairman should support management. But Ackermann sought to undermine Anshu Jain, who is to become one of two co-chief executives of the bank. And, his interference over the succession suggests he could be the worst sort of back-seat driver. This is not to deny the superficial appeal in Ackermann staying on. He would have all the connections to look after relations with Berlin and Deutschland AG. Employee board representatives want Ackermann to hang around, in part impressed by the public role he has played in solving both the credit crunch and euro zone crisis.

But it is Ackermann's very dominance that makes a supervisory board role so dangerous. A chairman's first job is to support and guide management. Ackermann has already made Jain's job tricky by championing former Bundesbank boss Axel Weber as chief executive. Weber's lack of commercial expertise merely heightened the snub.

A chairman shouldn't try to run the company himself. The point of separating supervisory and management boards is so the former can be a check on the latter.

Ackermann has already overstepped the mark. Finding his successors was Clemens Boersig's job. But that didn't stop Ackermann from touting Weber for the role - a ploy that rebounded when Weber chose UBS instead.

Ackermann will not surrender the CEO role until next May and may step up to be chairman thereafter. His contract was extended two years ago because he had failed to nurture an internal successor. He has done little in the intervening two years to help Jain fix the obvious German holes in his CV, say by giving him more exposure to the German business. Instead, he gave the impression that Jain was a prince of a prosperous but distant colony.

Ackermann may like to think he is king of all he surveys. But banks, as much as countries, are invigorated by a change of regime.