Meg Whitman's retirement as CEO of eBay got me thinking about succession. In particular, for smaller companies with a great CEO but relatively weak executive teams. I can think of quite a few companies which fall into this bracket: most of them are part way through transitioning from startup to their next incarnation, and the CEO in question has replaced the founding CEO.
In this case, if the CEO should suddenly leave the post (illness, accident etc.), from where should the new CEO be sourced? Externally or internally?
An outsider coming in would generally rely heavily of the executive team whilst they come up to speed, but a sub par executive may well do an awesome amount of damage during this phase. This is true even if they do nothing at all - in a startup or very young company, doing nothing is doing damage.
But promoting from within the ranks without the requisite depth and talent is almost certain to be more devastating.
So what to do?
A colleague suggested hiring from outside, but staying within the same market segment. This makes sense to me, but it relies on a competitor CEO being a) willing to be shifted, and b) unconstrained by a CNC. Neither of these are a given.
So, in the absence of any succession plan, what do you do?
Feed
Comments 1
yahoo handled it pretty well when Terry Semel left by appointing an interim ceo internally and using the time to address a few of their issues. microsoft offer probably changes all that though.
Posted February 7, 2008 at 10:07 a.m. ¶Comments are now closed.