Scheherazade Daneshkhu wrote a piece for the Financial Times entitled, CEO attrition gives directors chance to step up. According to the story,
Plucking a CEO from among a company’s existing directors is becoming a trend, says Marc Sanglé-Ferrière, head of the Paris office of Russell Reynolds, the US executive search company, who says traditional succession planning does not work in a time of crisis.
“The new CEOs have tended to come from outside or to have been a recently-recruited board member. We are seeing that, as part of succession planning, companies are increasingly looking to put on the board one or two non-executive directors who could have the potential to become the CEO,” he said.
While the focus of the story was on European companies, Liberum has seen some of the same circumstance crop up in the United States. It is not a large trend but there have been a number of cases.
Recommended Reading – CEO and CFO Career Consequences to Missing Quarterly Earnings Benchmarks – Academic Paper
September 24, 2008
Recommended Reading – SEC Targets CEO Succession Plans – New Risks for Boards, Says Heidrick & Struggles
October 30, 2009
Recommended Reading – Once an Outsider, Always an Outsider? CEO Origin, Strategic Change and Firm Performance – Rice
January 20, 2010
Recommended Reading – Successful leadership – how would you know? London Business School
February 13, 2009
Recommended Reading – Financials Post Sign of Times: CEO Wanted, Wall Street Journal
June 24, 2009