Friday, January 26, 2007

In search of excellence in CEO succession


The seven habits of highly effective boards

Selecting the new CEO is one of the Board’s three most crucial tasks, matched only by a decision to merge or sell the company, or the selection of a new Chairman.

Merely announcing who your next CEO will be can move the market value of your company by 5% or more1, and research by Harvard Business School on the value of a great CEO suggest figures of around 15% of your company’s market value2. Furthermore, the share prices of companies with successions that are unplanned typically under-perform their peers by more than 2%3.

Yet this ‘bet the company’ decision is still often tackled too late, with no recourse to a contingency plan, and without the benefit of enough data – as a recent client commented “there was less data in the process than in a footnote of a monthly Board pack”.

See full Article, in pdf format.