Moreover, many of those who got the chop were working in industries that had crashed: by far the highest rate of firings was in telecoms.Outside hires are far more likely to be fired than insiders: their average tenure is three years shorter.
Most of all they'll need to discard the distractions of practice field dust-ups and media fueled speculation about firings.
Test firings into the sea have continued this year, including of two missiles in early April, just before America's defence secretary, Ashton Carter, arrived in Seoul, the South's capital.
Charles Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York, called the firings an "unprecedented breach of trust, abuse of power and misuse of the Justice Department".
Merging the two would not immediately stop the price wars in telecoms, but by bringing together complementary rather than competing businesses might well encounter less resistance from competition authorities and result in fewer firings.
But even at the level of individual schools, the hirings and firings have not improved performance.
Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he will cite the White House for criminal contempt of Congress if he does not receive documents related to the firings of nine federal prosecutors.
In 1996 Al Dunlap ("Chainsaw Al", because of his fondness for firings) was hired to run Sunbeam, an appliance maker in deep trouble.
That they still couldn't keep their systems online (or have adequate back-ups available) is damning, and it's no surprise that some analysts are calling for C-suite firings.
Mr Liveris says that the evidence of their "highly inappropriate" behaviour was "irrefutable".Until recently, the notion that he might have to fend off private-equity buyers would have seemed absurd to Mr Liveris, who publicly denied that there was any private-equity interest in Dow shortly before the firings.
Another Booz finding is common to both sides of the Atlantic: looking back over recent years, board disputes and power struggles lie behind a third of chief-executive firings.
