Expert perspectives on executive succession, leadership risk, and board governance.
An 8-of-10 composite readiness score. A unanimous board vote. Eighteen months later, an accepted resignation. The number was technically accurate. It was wrong about everything that mattered.
A Leadership Risk Review is not a discussion, a workshop, or a talent review. It produces a board-ready diagnostic with sourced evidence on every claim and a named owner on every gap. Here is what the engagement examines, what the board receives, and what actions come out of it.
A board does not govern succession by reviewing a plan. It governs succession when it receives a repeatable artifact showing critical roles, readiness evidence, exposure, and next-quarter actions. Here is what that artifact contains.
Boards audit financial controls, cyber risk, and compliance to fiduciary standard. Executive readiness gets a roster review. Here is what audit-committee rigor looks like applied to succession.
A defensible Ready Now is not a label assigned to a roster. It is an evidence standard the roster is held against, with five components scored separately against role-specific evidence.
Confident readiness recommendations don't survive a deposition. Provable readiness does. The discipline that makes the difference is structural.
External capital allocators price key-person concentration. Most boards do not. The gap between the two valuations is the unpriced exposure.
Concentration, encumbrance, and false-positive readiness hide the actual succession exposure inside the language of bench depth. Map the coverage.
Succession plans built for stable transitions fail under pressure. Five board-level blind spots show up the moment the plan is forced. Read the diagnosis.
Confident readiness scores measure comfort, not capability. The assessment that survives a forced transition looks structurally different. See the gap.