He's the man - if fund firm is able to improve performance

Bob Reynolds?

That was my initial reaction to the news that the former vice chairman and chief operating officer of Fidelity Investments was joining rival Putnam Investments as its chief executive. Are they really a match?

New chief executives take their positions with some kind of primary mission in mind. They are given the job of building the company or reshaping it or simply taking advantage of a big opportunity that has presented itself. A few are caretakers. The job of Putnam's new chief executive is to fix the business.

If you were to think of Putnam as a big problem, and that is the correct perspective, it's all about the poor relative investment performance of its products. Reynolds has long experience at a money management firm bigger and more complex than Putnam, but he's a marketing guy first and foremost.

"Bob's biggest skill is increasing the passion of the human capital he oversees and knowing how to deploy it to make sales," says Jim Lowell, publisher of the Fidelity Investor newsletter. "Bob was born a salesman."

Okay, I would have to agree with that. But it doesn't answer the question.

Reynolds was a Fidelity lifer who hit the glass ceiling at the House of Johnson and didn't want to be a second banana forever. It was hardly a unique experience. Bob Pozen, a lawyer, took that walk before him and eventually joined another Boston firm, MFS Investment Management, as its high-impact chairman. But MFS was facing serious legal and regulatory problems at the time, so it was clear how he might be the right person at the right time.

It's been a year since Reynolds left Fidelity. He knew he wanted to run a company in his next job and opportunities like that don't grow on trees. Now Reynolds and Putnam have found each other, and he has his work cut out for him.

Putnam has been bleeding business for years. Shareholders have been pulling money out of their Putnam mutual funds at a pace that no other investment company has had to endure. Poor investment returns are the chief culprit.

There isn't enough space here to fully describe all of Putnam's investment performance problems. I devoted an entire column to them four months ago. The executive summary: Mutual-fund returns, across a broad range of products, have been below average or worse in the short, medium, and long term. Putnam's biggest funds have been among its worst performers. There are some exceptions, particularly among the fixed-income funds, but not many.

Putnam's struggles have been going on for many years. Its performance plunged with the technology stock crash at the start of the decade. On top of that, scandals tarnished Putnam's reputation and got the company into hot water with regulators. There didn't seem to be any reason in the world to do business with Putnam.

When all those bad things were happening at Putnam, Janus Capital Group was going through nearly the same experience. It also lost big with go-go stocks at the start of the decade and found its way into ethical hot water at about the same time.

But the performance at Janus funds finally started to pick up last year, when growth stocks came back into vogue, and investors started buying into the company's funds again.

It was like watching a plant left for dead on the windowsill come back to life.

The Janus revival convinced me that something had changed. Enough time had passed. The black marks of six or eight years ago no longer kept investors away, as long as they had a good reason to come back.

That's what is so frustrating about Putnam. It could begin to recover now. That hasn't happened, and it won't until Putnam funds can do better.

For all his marketing experience, Reynolds actually did run Fidelity's investment operations for a brief period near the end of his career at the company. Reynolds did some things, like placing a greater emphasis on the work and careers of investment analysts inside the company, but his time in that role was too brief to form any real opinion. Grade him incomplete.

Reynolds does have the capacity to energize an organization like Putnam, and that's a skill not to be overlooked. If Putnam improves performance, Reynolds is just the guy who can create investment products, package them, and sell them to brokers and advisers like there's no tomorrow. They are all critical skills.

Those qualities make Bob Reynolds a very good choice if Putnam can do better for its customers. Not much will change if it cannot.

Steven Syre is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at syre@globe.com.