The importance of succession planning has rarely been more important. From 2022 and on, it is widely predicted that the frequency of CEO successions will rise drastically.

A sizeable minority of CEOs—one in four of those who participated in our survey—say that sustainability is already a major driver of their decisions. In this article, we shine a spotlight on these CEOs at the vanguard of the transformation to sustainable business.

Read on for the key takeaways from an engaging discussion on the future of cultivating and transitioning leaders, from CEOs to board members.

The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented turmoil around the world. For companies and their boards, it meant reacting quickly and decisively in a gloomy landscape. To understand the state of governance in this landscape, we held regular virtual gatherings throughout 2020 and 2021 with a diverse group of board chairs and non-executive directors from around the APAC region.

Egon Zehnder’s 2020 Global Board Diversity Tracker, which analyses companies with a market cap of €6billion, put the number of board seats held by women in Latin America at 11.6 per cent in 2020, an increase of only 3.3 percentage points in two years, compared to 32 per cent in Western Europe and 27 per cent in the US and Canada

Interviewing for First-Time Board Service: read successful strategies for meeting the unique challenges of interviewing for a directorship.

Companies adopt more socially and ecologically sustainable practices when the board includes women and environmental experts and when younger members are elected to the board on a regular basis. Such are the initial findings of a big-data study focusing on publicly traded European companies, conducted by the leadership consulting firm Egon Zehnder in cooperation with the University of Göttingen. Nina Schmarander and Carsten Wundrack from Egon Zehnder together with Professor Michael Wolff from the University of Göttingen discuss the study in this Egon Zehnder Snapshot.

Out Leadership Founder Todd Sears is joined by two phenomenal leaders, Lisa Blais, who leads the US Board Practice for Egon Zehnder, and pioneering LGBTQ+ leader and Board Director Beth Brooke, who was newly named to the New York Times Board.

At India's first Corporate Governance Exchange event, Douglas Baillie, former CEO of Hindustan Unilever and currently a director at Huhtamaki and Airtel Africa, shares insights on talent management and CEO succession.

CEOs are the mainstay of their companies – both externally and internally. They hold primary responsibility for developing and implementing forward-looking strategies and evolving corporate culture. And in our hyper-complex and fast-paced age, they are the voice of the company and architects of value creation that goes well beyond financial gain. Appointing the CEO is one of the most important decisions and extensive tasks of any board of directors.