Succession almost never fails in the plan. It fails in the founder who wrote it. I have sat in enough of these rooms to know the shape of the thing before anyone speaks. The document is excellent. There is a timeline, a governance structure, a shareholders’...
The better someone is at the second job, the less likely they are ever to be handed the first. That is not bad luck, and it is not a failure of talent-spotting. It is the mechanism working exactly as designed, and almost nobody in the building will say it out loud —...
Nobody in that room is listening to your plan. They are listening for whether you intend to replace what they lost. That is the whole of it. You have prepared a hundred-day plan, and it is probably a good one — market read, cost lines, the three initiatives you would...
Nobody sells a company. They sell the apparatus that made them necessary. That is the sentence owners resist hardest, usually some months after the closing, somewhere between the third unnecessary acquisition call and the second advisory role they have already stopped...
Authority does not come off at the front door. That is the part almost nobody plans for. Executives prepare for the scrutiny, the board, the succession politics, the loneliness of the seat. They do not prepare for the fact that the role travels home in the body — that...
The cruellest thing I see in organisations is not a dismissal. It is a dismissal that takes three years. Somewhere in most established companies there is a senior person everybody has quietly stopped relying on. He was there at the beginning. He carried the firm...
