Kmart Will Need a Discount Retail Super-Hero as New CEO : Executives: But headhunters, analysts agree that there are talented prospects for the position.

So who will be the right man or woman to step into the top job at Kmart, vacated Tuesday--at long last, say critics--by Joseph Antonini?

Headhunters and retailing industry analysts say there are a number of talented prospects out there, but they agree that the position poses some daunting challenges, as will the search for Antonini’s successor.

The discount chain’s next chief executive, they say, will need to understand the shopping mentality of “Roseanne” yet have the marketing savvy of Charles Lazarus, the legendary founder of Toys R Us.

Whoever it is must have “a tremendous sense of the discount marketplace,” said John Sibbald, an executive search consultant in Chicago. The new CEO also will require a strategic vision, excellent people skills--to help rebuild the morale of the Troy, Mich., discounter’s beleaguered employees--and the credibility to smooth the company’s frayed links with Wall Street.

Not the kind of character you can get on a blue-light special.

During the months Kmart’s board stuck by Antonini, the company missed out on some good prospects, analysts noted.

Roger Farah, who sparked a legal battle when he defected from Federated Department Stores to R.H. Macy & Co., left to join Woolworth as CEO after those two department store companies merged. And Myron E. Ullman III, former Macy’s president and CEO, became chief executive of DFS Group, a chain of duty-free stores.

Many observers speculated that Kmart failed to line up a successor to Antonini because attractive candidates balked at serving under him with no promise that they would ascend soon to the top job.

Antonini, who spent 31 years at Kmart, came in for heavy criticism the last few years for his inability to accomplish a turnaround. He relinquished the chairman’s title two months ago, but institutional shareholders had continued to pressure the board of directors to oust him from his other posts because of persistent inventory problems and the plodding pace of store renovations.

“We’re very pleased at how active the board has become,” said Richard Koppes, general counsel of the California Public Employees Retirement System, better known as CalPERS. Last fall, the activist, Sacramento-based investment fund had targeted Kmart as a company in need of vast improvement in its bottom line. CalPERS holds 2.8 million Kmart shares.

Kmart need not go outside to seek Antonini’s replacement, Sibbald noted. It has recently hired a bevy of talented executives from other companies. They include Ronald J. Floto, formerly of Kash n’ Karry Food Stores, who heads the Super Kmart combination grocery-and-discount stores. An accomplished turnaround artist, he worked previously at Jewel Cos., a food retailer, for Donald S. Perkins, a Kmart director who in January was named chairman after Antonini’s ouster.

Among other suggestions by headhunters and industry analysts were Robert Nakasone, president and vice chairman of Toys R Us, and Michael Bozic, a former Sears executive who has led a comeback at Hills Stores Co., a regional discount chain based in Canton, Mass.

“In any retailing environment, the top spot should be held by a merchant, not a financial type,” said J. Blade Corwin, a principal with Seitchik Corwin & Seitchik, a San Francisco-based executive search firm that specializes in fashion and retailing.

Ideally, observers noted, Kmart would do well to find another Arthur Martinez, a former executive at tony Saks Fifth Avenue who leaped to stodgy Sears, Roebuck & Co. and prodded it quickly to a remarkable turnaround.

Failing that, said Rosemary Sisson, a bond analyst at the Salomon Bros. investment firm in New York, “if they could get somebody from Wal-Mart”--the discounter that has been whipping Kmart at its own game--”wouldn’t that be fun?”