Board Consulting

The past year and a half have brought economic and business conditions most directors had only read about in history books. With an economic recovery now showing some green shoots, will your board simply try to forget the past and move ahead – or will you make a careful inventory o the governance lessons your board has learned?

Boards and their companies spend millions annually on independent advice. Yet when it comes to CEO succession planning — that is, deciding whom to pay, not how much — many of these same boards and their sitting CEOs decline to invest in benchmarking internal CEO candidates against external talent. Based on our experience working with boards of leading companies, we believe it’s a mistake not to. A board that forgoes benchmarking is, in effect, conducting succession with blinders on, unable to see or judge talent that is not immediately in front of them.