50 Remarkable Thought Leaders on CEO Succession

Every great organisation eventually faces the same question: what happens when the leader who built it steps aside? CEO succession is the moment where strategy, governance, culture, and human dynamics collide at once. When it goes well, organisations emerge stronger, more focused, and better aligned with where the world is heading. When it goes badly, the cost is staggering. Research from Harvard Business Review suggests that poor CEO transitions wipe out close to one trillion dollars in market value each year for S&P 1500 companies alone.

Yet most organisations are not ready. According to Heidrick and Struggles' 2025 Route to the Top research, only 26 percent of CEOs and board members describe CEO succession as a top priority that is genuinely treated as such. Fewer than half of board directors say they could name an internal successor if their CEO became unavailable tomorrow. In 2025, CEO turnover at large-cap companies hit levels not seen in years, with boards proactively replacing leaders even at high-performing organisations as they sought to align leadership capabilities with accelerating change.

The voices that matter most right now are not the ones who have turned succession into a glossy governance checklist. They are the researchers, practitioners, coaches, and board advisors who have sat in the room where these decisions get made, who have watched transitions succeed and fail, and who have developed frameworks that are genuinely predictive rather than retrospectively tidy. This guide brings together 50 of the most influential thought leaders on CEO succession globally in 2026. These are the authors, consultants, academics, and practitioners who are shaping how boards, CHROs, and executives think about leadership transition, successor development, and what it actually takes for an incoming CEO to succeed rather than merely survive.

If you lead an organisation, chair a board, sit in a CHRO role, or find yourself in the succession candidate pipeline, these are the thinkers to follow. Their work will not make the conversation easier. But it will make it far more likely to result in something genuinely good.

Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant and facilitator who works with executive teams navigating the cultural and human dynamics that CEO succession stirs up. To discuss a leadership offsite or workshop, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why CEO Succession Matters More Than Ever

The numbers have changed. In 2025, more than 2,000 US-based CEOs left their roles, including nearly 450 at publicly traded companies, according to executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. That was a record. Meanwhile, more than 11 percent of S&P 500 CEOs are now in the 65 to 69 age bracket, up from just over 7 percent in 2017. A wave of retirement-driven transitions is building. The generation of leaders who most naturally succeed them, those in their mid to late 50s, has been declining as a share of the C-suite for years.

The boards that treat succession as an evergreen governance priority, keeping internal pipelines active, assessing candidates continuously, and planning with at least a five-year horizon, consistently outperform boards that treat it as a crisis response. Research from Russell Reynolds Associates found that companies with the most disciplined succession processes reported higher financial performance and greater leadership confidence than peers. The correlation is not accidental. When organisations know who could lead and what they would need to succeed, they can give high-potential executives the exposures, experiences, and feedback they need years before the transition arrives.

The cost of getting it wrong is not only financial. Botched CEO transitions erode employee trust, alarm investors, destabilise senior teams, and often accelerate the very performance problems they were supposed to solve. Companies that have suffered the most visible succession failures, those in which a new CEO departed within 18 months or an external hire struggled to land in a culture shaped by decades of a different leader's instincts, frequently share one characteristic: they treated succession as an event rather than a process.

The thought leaders on this list are united by one conviction. CEO succession is not a governance box to check. It is the most consequential strategic act a board can take. Getting it right requires clear thinking, honest assessment, and the willingness to have uncomfortable conversations long before they become urgent.

If you want to bring those conversations into your leadership team now rather than waiting for urgency to force them, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, facilitates executive offsites that help boards and senior teams think clearly about leadership transitions, succession readiness, and the culture your next CEO will inherit. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to find out more.

How This List Was Compiled

The 50 people on this list were selected based on their genuine, sustained contribution to how the field of CEO succession has evolved. Selection criteria included formal credentials in governance, leadership, organisational psychology, or executive assessment; a track record of published research, books, or frameworks that practitioners actually use; active engagement with current questions in the field; and the ability to surface ideas that challenge conventional wisdom rather than simply confirm it.

Geographic diversity was a deliberate priority. The list includes voices from the United States, United Kingdom, continental Europe, Latin America, Canada, Australia, India, and beyond, reflecting the reality that CEO succession operates differently across governance cultures, ownership structures, and market contexts. Disciplinary diversity was equally important: the list spans executive search, management consulting, academic research, executive coaching, board advisory, journalism, and independent practice.

The result is a list that looks different from the standard roundup of famous names on succession. It deliberately surfaces practitioners and researchers who are actively shaping the field in 2026, not simply the authors whose books from a decade ago still top search results.

CATEGORY 1: The Search Firm Architects

These six practitioners work at the intersection of governance and talent strategy, advising boards directly on how to identify, develop, and select their next CEO. Their work combines the analytical rigour of leadership assessment with the practical wisdom that comes only from having sat at the table during some of the highest-stakes decisions a board will ever make.

1. Claudius A. Hildebrand

Spencer Stuart's CEO Performance Analytics lead and co-author, with Robert J. Stark, of The Life Cycle of a CEO, Hildebrand brings a rare combination of quantitative rigour and coaching depth to succession conversations. His work, based on an unprecedented study of every twenty-first-century S&P 500 CEO, identified five distinct stages that nearly every CEO navigates, from launch to reinvention, each requiring a fundamentally different set of behaviours and a different kind of board support.

The practical implication of Hildebrand's research is that boards often select successors for the first stage of a CEO's tenure but fail to think about whether those successors have the adaptability to navigate later stages. His Harvard Business Review writing, including his 2025 piece with Kate Hurley and Giovanna Galli on how boards are engaging in three particularly problematic succession behaviours, has reframed how governance professionals think about the entire arc of CEO performance rather than just the appointment moment.

2. Robert J. Stark

Robert Stark co-leads Spencer Stuart's CEO Succession practice and co-authored The Life Cycle of a CEO alongside Claudius Hildebrand, bringing a different but equally essential lens: the lived experience of coaching CEOs through transitions and advising boards through the practical mechanics of succession. His insights appear frequently in Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal, and his work with CEO aspirants on what it actually takes to prepare for the role is among the most practically grounded in the field.

Stark's LinkedIn presence reflects someone genuinely wrestling with current succession dynamics. His recent writing on how the aging of the CEO population is creating a bottleneck in timing for Generation X leaders is an example of the kind of forward-looking analysis that practitioners find genuinely useful rather than merely confirmatory.

3. Jane Edison Stevenson

As Global Vice Chair of Korn Ferry's Board and CEO Services practice and the firm's global leader for CEO succession, Jane Edison Stevenson leads a team of more than 150 partners across search, assessment, and development. BusinessWeek has named her one of the 100 Most Influential Search Consultants in the World. Her Women CEOs Speak research, conducted with 57 Fortune 1000 women CEOs and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation's 100x25 programme, has been among the most important contributions to understanding the systemic reasons why diverse talent does not reach the top at a representative rate.

Stevenson's consistent message in 2025 and 2026 has been that boards face a deepening pipeline problem: fewer people are actively pursuing senior leadership roles, and organisations that have not invested in developing internal succession candidates are arriving at transitions with fewer genuine choices than they would have had a decade ago. Her combination of research depth, institutional authority, and willingness to share contrarian perspectives makes her one of the essential voices in this field.

4. Bonnie Gwin

Bonnie Gwin is Vice Chairman and Co-Managing Partner of the Global CEO and Board of Directors Practice at Heidrick and Struggles. Research produced by Gwin and her colleagues found that only half of board directors reported having a credible internal successor candidate they could name if the CEO needed to be replaced tomorrow. That data point alone represents a significant governance risk across the global corporate sector.

Gwin's work is particularly notable for its focus on the board's role and responsibility in succession, rather than positioning the CEO as the primary driver of the process. Her thinking has helped reframe CEO succession from a management task to a governance imperative, with practical implications for how boards structure their committees, engage with potential successors, and maintain succession as a standing agenda item rather than a crisis response.

5. Jenni Hibbert

As a senior partner at Heidrick and Struggles focusing on CEO succession and board governance, Jenni Hibbert has spent years advising organisations through planned and unplanned leadership transitions. Her November 2025 piece on the Berkshire Hathaway succession process, examining how Warren Buffett and his board deliberately positioned Greg Abel for the CEO role years in advance, is an excellent example of the kind of case-based thinking that makes succession theory practical.

Hibbert's perspective on succession emphasises the distinction between selecting the right CEO for today versus positioning the organisation for tomorrow. Her work with boards in volatile, fast-changing contexts has informed her view that the most important moment in succession is not the announcement but the three to five years of preparation that precede it. She is a consistent, thoughtful voice on LinkedIn and in Heidrick's published research.

6. Rich Fields

Rich Fields leads Russell Reynolds Associates' Board Effectiveness practice and has been one of the firm's most prominent contributors to its annual Global Corporate Governance Trends research, which tracks how boards in different markets are approaching CEO succession. The 2026 report co-authored by Fields and his colleagues identified that boards globally are spending more time on proactive executive development and succession planning than at any point in recent memory.

Fields' work addresses a gap that many governance commentators overlook: the question of how boards organise themselves for succession, not just what they decide. Who leads the succession committee? How are directors engaged who have no prior experience hiring a CEO? How does the board maintain confidentiality while still conducting meaningful assessment? His practical answers to these questions make him one of the most useful voices for directors navigating their first CEO transition.

CATEGORY 2: The Academic Architects

These eight researchers have built the theoretical and empirical foundation on which modern CEO succession practice rests. Their work spans management science, organisational psychology, corporate governance, and strategy, and it has shaped how practitioners design assessment processes, board engagement frameworks, and successor development programmes.

7. Ram Charan

Few names appear more frequently in CEO succession conversations than Ram Charan, the India-born global leadership adviser who has consulted for some of the world's largest corporations for more than four decades. His 2005 Harvard Business Review article Ending the CEO Succession Crisis was one of the first to systematically document why succession processes fail and what boards and organisations can do differently. His co-authored book The Leadership Pipeline, written with Stephen Drotter and James Noel, remains the foundational framework for thinking about how leadership capability must evolve as people move through an organisation toward the CEO role.

Charan's most current contribution is his clarity about the shareholder activism dimension of succession: his observation that activist investors now effectively function as external succession catalysts, forcing boards to accelerate leadership decisions they might have deferred, is an important reframe of the external pressures that shape succession timelines in 2026. Charan Associates is his Dallas-based consultancy, and he is a Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee.

8. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

The founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale School of Management and one of the most visible commentators on corporate governance, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has spent decades studying CEO performance, transitions, and the board dynamics that shape them. His work on CEO legacy and departure is particularly important: he was among the first researchers to document the psychological dimension of succession, including the ways in which outgoing CEOs can either ease or undermine transitions depending on how they process the end of their tenure.

Sonnenfeld is known for convening the Yale CEO Summit, which regularly brings together senior executives and board directors for frank discussions about leadership challenges. His media presence is extensive, including regular contributions to Fortune and CNBC, and he has been a consistent advocate for boards taking a more robust and independent role in succession rather than simply ratifying the outgoing CEO's preferred choice.

9. Sydney Finkelstein

The Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and author of the widely studied book Why Smart Executives Fail, Sydney Finkelstein has brought a forensic perspective to CEO succession by asking not just what makes successions succeed but what makes them fail in ways that look avoidable in retrospect. His research on superbosses, leaders who build extraordinary succession pipelines almost as a side effect of how they develop talent, is one of the most useful frameworks for thinking about succession as a cultural attribute rather than a governance process.

Finkelstein's 2016 book Superbosses documents how leaders like Julian Robertson, Lorne Michaels, and Alice Waters produced disproportionate numbers of successful successors and proteges, and extracts the specific practices that explain their track record. His work invites boards and executives to ask a different question: not 'have we filled out the succession plan?' but 'are we building an organisation that genuinely produces great leaders at every level?'

10. Bill George

The former CEO of Medtronic and senior fellow at Harvard Business School, Bill George is one of the most credible voices on CEO succession because he has lived it from both sides: as an incoming CEO who transformed Medtronic over more than a decade, and as a board member and governance commentator who has studied what separates successful transitions from destructive ones. His concept of the authentic leader, developed in his bestselling book of the same name, has shaped how many organisations think about what they are actually looking for in a successor.

George has been particularly vocal about the need for boards to resist the temptation of a safe succession, one that prioritises stability and investor reassurance over the genuine strategic transformation that may be required. His work at Harvard Business School on corporate governance and leadership development continues to inform how executives and directors think about the pipeline problem that sits beneath every CEO transition.

11. Boris Groysberg

A professor at Harvard Business School and one of the world's leading researchers on executive talent, Boris Groysberg has spent his career studying how leadership performance travels, or more precisely, how much of what looks like an individual CEO's success is actually context-dependent rather than portable. His research on the star problem, which examines what happens when high-performing executives move to new organisations, has significant implications for CEO succession: organisations that recruit externally expecting that a star's performance will replicate itself in a different context frequently discover that it does not.

Groysberg's work is a useful corrective to the bias that many boards have toward high-profile external candidates. His research suggests that internal candidates, precisely because they understand the organisation's culture, relationships, and institutional knowledge, often have structural advantages that assessment processes undervalue. This is backed by recent industry data: Russell Reynolds found that 68 percent of global CEO appointments in 2025 were internal candidates.

12. Dave Ulrich

As the Rensis Likert Professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and a partner at the RBL Group, Dave Ulrich is one of the most cited management scholars in the world. His work on leadership capital, human capability, and the strategic role of HR has direct implications for CEO succession, particularly his framework for thinking about leadership as a source of investor value rather than simply an operational input.

Ulrich's recent work on the CHRO's role in succession is particularly relevant in 2026, when CHROs are being asked to play a more strategic and board-facing role in ensuring leadership pipeline strength. His co-authored research with Norm Smallwood on building organisational capability has helped senior HR leaders articulate why succession readiness is a measurable, manageable, and strategically important asset.

13. Norm Smallwood

As co-founder and partner at the RBL Group and a long-time collaborator of Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood has built a substantial body of work on leadership capital and the measurement of intangible assets that directly relates to how boards and investors should think about CEO succession readiness. His framework for understanding leadership as a source of firm value has helped governance professionals move beyond the intuitive question of who do we trust, toward a more systematic approach to successor assessment.

Smallwood's LinkedIn presence is active and substantive, with regular commentary on leadership development, succession, and the role of HR in building bench strength. His perspective is distinctive in its emphasis on the investor view of leadership: what signals does a company's succession process send to the market about the quality of its governance and the depth of its talent pipeline?

14. Herminia Ibarra

The Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and one of the world's leading authorities on leadership identity and transitions, Herminia Ibarra brings a dimension to CEO succession that is rarely addressed in governance-focused literature: the inner work that both the outgoing and incoming CEO must do to make a transition genuinely successful. Her book Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader challenges the conventional advice that executives should develop a clear leadership identity before stepping into a bigger role. She argues, convincingly, that identity follows from action rather than preceding it.

This insight has significant implications for how boards think about successor readiness. A candidate who does not yet look like a CEO may be the right choice precisely because they are still genuinely developing, still capable of the kind of adaptive learning that the role will demand. Ibarra's work is a useful challenge to the tendency of succession processes to privilege those who have already mastered a previous version of the role rather than leaders who are most capable of mastering what comes next.

CATEGORY 3: The Transition Specialists

These seven practitioners and authors have built their reputations specifically on the art of navigating leadership transitions, whether from the perspective of the incoming executive, the outgoing leader, the board, or the organisation around them.

15. Michael D. Watkins

Michael Watkins is the author of The First 90 Days, the single most widely read resource for executives navigating new leadership roles. Now updated and in its third edition, the book has sold more than 1.5 million copies and is routinely assigned by boards, search firms, and HR leaders as a resource for every incoming CEO. Watkins, who is a professor at IMD Business School and co-founder of Genesis Advisers, has built a consulting practice around leadership transition and has extended his thinking into the specific challenges of CEO succession in large, complex organisations.

His recent work at IMD focuses on the intersection of transition and transformation: what happens when an incoming CEO is expected not just to sustain what the organisation is but to fundamentally change it. His framework for distinguishing between different transition contexts, turnaround, startup, realignment, and sustaining success, remains one of the most practically useful tools in the succession literature for helping boards and candidates think clearly about what kind of leader a specific moment actually requires.

16. Dan Ciampa

Dan Ciampa is a former CEO, executive adviser to boards and senior executives, and author of five books, including the co-authored Transitions at the Top: What Organizations Must Do to Make Sure New Leaders Succeed, written with David Dotlich. His 2024 Harvard Business Review piece on power, influence, and CEO succession, co-authored with Adam Bryant, is among the most candid assessments of the political dynamics that shape succession decisions in organisations where internal politics have not been honestly confronted.

Ciampa's perspective is particularly valuable for his frank treatment of what he calls the political economy of succession: the relationships, coalitions, legacy loyalties, and unspoken expectations that determine whether a board's official succession process actually governs who gets selected, or whether a parallel informal process does. His work is a valuable corrective for boards who believe that having a structured process automatically produces an unbiased outcome.

17. David Dotlich

A founding president of Pivot Leadership, a Korn Ferry company, and the co-author of twelve books on leadership including Why CEOs Fail and Transitions at the Top, written with Dan Ciampa, David Dotlich has spent more than three decades advising boards and CEOs on succession, culture change, and executive development. Named one of the top 50 coaches in the United States, his work with Fortune 500 clients including Google, Medtronic, Nike, and Johnson and Johnson has given him an unusually rich dataset of what actually differentiates successful CEO transitions from unsuccessful ones.

Dotlich's contribution to the succession literature is particularly strong on the psychological dimension: the role of ego, identity, and attachment to power in making it difficult for outgoing leaders to release control genuinely, and the ways in which incoming leaders can be undermined not by external forces but by the protective instincts of the organisations they are joining.

18. Adam Bryant

Adam Bryant is the senior managing director and partner of the ExCo Group and one of the most prolific interviewers of CEOs in the world, having conducted more than 1,000 leadership interviews during his time as a senior writer and editor at the New York Times and subsequently for his LinkedIn series. He is co-author, with Kevin Sharer, of The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021), and author of The Leap to Leader. His 2024 HBR piece on power and succession, co-authored with Dan Ciampa, draws on his extraordinary exposure to how leaders think about transitions, successors, and the legacy they want to leave.

What makes Bryant distinctive among the voices on this list is that his knowledge is built on listening rather than advising. His willingness to let executives speak in their own words about what they did wrong, what they wish they had done differently, and what they would tell their successor creates a texture of honesty that more theoretical succession frameworks rarely achieve.

19. Stephen Miles

The founder and CEO of The Miles Group, Stephen Miles has built one of the most respected boutique CEO advisory practices in the United States, working with boards and executives on succession readiness, CEO performance, and the dynamics of leadership transition in large organisations. His work is distinctive in its emphasis on CEO readiness: not just whether a candidate has the right credentials but whether they have the emotional maturity, self-awareness, and stakeholder intelligence to lead in the specific context of a given organisation at a given moment.

Miles is a regular contributor to Forbes and other business publications, and his LinkedIn presence reflects someone actively engaged with the current wave of CEO transitions. His recent writing on the gap between the CEO profile boards say they want and the behaviour they actually reward in successor candidates is one of the most practically useful challenges to conventional succession thinking currently circulating in governance circles.

20. Ron Carucci

As managing partner at Navalent and a published researcher on leadership transitions and organisational behaviour, Ron Carucci has built his reputation on a willingness to go where succession conversations rarely go: the failure modes that organisations create for new CEOs before those CEOs arrive. His Harvard Business Review research, published over several years, identified that the majority of senior leader failures are predictable from the structural and cultural conditions the incoming leader inherits rather than from the leader's own capabilities.

Carucci's co-authored book Rising to Power, written with Eric Hansen, examines the specific vulnerabilities that leaders carry as they move into the most senior roles, and his ongoing research on why good executives fail in new roles is a counterpoint to the succession industry's tendency to focus almost exclusively on selection rather than transition design. His work asks a harder question: even if you select the right person, are you setting them up to succeed?

21. Mark Thompson

A globally recognised executive coach and co-author, with Byron Loflin, of CEO Ready: What You Need to Know to Earn the Job and Keep the Job, published by Harvard Business Review Press in November 2025, Mark Thompson brings both the practitioner's granularity and the storyteller's accessibility to CEO succession. His recent Fortune piece on the threat of activist investor-driven CEO displacement raised important questions about what succession readiness means in an era when boards can lose control of their own succession timelines to external forces.

Thompson's work spans executive coaching, board advisory, and leadership writing, and he has worked with CEOs and boards across a wide range of industries. His thinking on what the succession process looks like from the inside for a candidate in the pipeline is particularly useful for organisations trying to develop successors rather than simply identify them.

CATEGORY 4: The Research-Based Practitioners

These eight practitioners combine rigorous research methodologies with deep client-facing practice, producing insights that are both empirically grounded and operationally applicable.

22. Blair Jones

Blair Jones is a managing director at Semler Brossy and one of the most cited researchers on CEO succession practices and executive compensation governance. She has been named to the NACD Directorship D100, which recognises the most influential people in the boardroom community, every year since 2013. Her work on the intersection of executive compensation and CEO succession is particularly important in a moment when boards are increasingly asked to use compensation design as a tool for developing and retaining successor candidates rather than simply rewarding past performance.

Jones co-produces Semler Brossy's annual CEO Succession Practices report, which tracks succession rates, tenure patterns, diversity trends, and governance approaches across the Russell 3000 and S&P 500. Her March 2026 contribution to a Conference Board podcast on what drives CEO succession in the current environment offered one of the clearest analyses available of why high-performing companies are now proactively replacing CEOs as a strategic rather than reactive decision.

23. Brian Campbell

As leader of the Governance and Sustainability Center at The Conference Board, Brian Campbell oversees one of the most important research streams on CEO succession currently being produced anywhere in the world. The Conference Board's annual CEO succession data, produced in partnership with Semler Brossy and Egon Zehnder, has become the definitive empirical resource for governance professionals tracking succession trends across the S&P 500 and Russell 3000.

Campbell's work is not simply about tracking numbers. His research and the podcasts and reports it generates are focused on the practical question of what boards can do with succession data: how to use turnover patterns, tenure distributions, and diversity trends to identify where pipeline problems are developing before they become crises. His contributions to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance are among the most widely read governance research outputs currently available.

24. Matteo Tonello

As head of Data Benchmarking and Analytics at The Conference Board, Matteo Tonello has been one of the most prolific producers of empirical research on CEO succession, board governance, and corporate leadership practices. His work on CEO and board leadership structures, co-produced with Ariane Marchis-Mouren and published in 2026 on the Harvard Law School Forum, is an example of the kind of rigorous, large-scale data analysis that helps boards understand their own practices in the context of what peers are doing.

Tonello's value in this field is his ability to translate complex governance data into accessible insights without sacrificing analytical depth. His research on the relationship between leadership structure, whether the CEO and chair roles are combined or separated, and succession events provides boards with evidence-based guidance on a question that generates significant disagreement in the governance community.

25. Samantha Hellauer

As director of strategic initiatives and client solutions at ghSMART, one of the world's leading CEO advisory firms, Samantha Hellauer has contributed directly to the research infrastructure of modern CEO succession. Her January 2026 Harvard Business Review article on leading after the founder, co-authored with Sanja Kos, Julie Vermoote, Sapna Sadarangani Werner, and BJ Wright, is one of the most practically useful recent contributions to the succession literature, drawing on advisory experience, dozens of in-depth interviews, and client case studies to examine why founder handovers are so much more prone to failure than other leadership transitions.

Hellauer's work is particularly relevant for boards in family businesses, founder-led technology companies, and any organisation where the incoming CEO must navigate the ongoing presence of the person who created the entity they are now being asked to lead. Her research identifies specific, practical steps that founders, incoming CEOs, boards, and investors can take to design a handover that genuinely enables the successor to lead.

26. Sanja Kos

A partner at ghSMART and trained psychologist, Sanja Kos brings a behavioural science perspective to CEO succession that is missing from most governance-focused approaches. Her work on the psychological dimensions of leadership transition, including the emotional processes that outgoing CEOs and their successors move through, draws on clinical as well as organisational psychology to surface the human dynamics that make succession processes either enabling or sabotaging.

Kos is a co-author of the January 2026 HBR piece on leading after the founder, alongside Samantha Hellauer and three additional ghSMART colleagues, and her advisory work with investors and their portfolio executives gives her an unusually clear view of what succession looks like in private equity and venture capital contexts, where the timelines are compressed, the stakes are immediate, and the founder's presence is often more emotionally charged than in public company transitions.

27. Claudio Fernandez-Araoz

A former senior partner at Egon Zehnder, now an Executive Fellow for Executive Education at Harvard Business School, Claudio Fernandez-Araoz has built a career arguing that potential, rather than experience or performance, is the key predictor of success in senior leadership roles. His Harvard Business Review articles, including the widely cited 21st Century Talent Spotting, have shaped how practitioners think about what they are actually trying to measure when they assess CEO candidates.

Fernandez-Araoz's framework of potential, centred on the dimensions of motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination, offers boards and succession committees a more robust basis for evaluating candidates than the competency lists and career trajectory analyses that most succession processes rely on. His work has been particularly influential in challenging the tendency of boards to select successors who closely resemble the outgoing CEO rather than leaders who are best positioned for what the organisation needs next.

28. Constance Dierickx

An independent consultant and executive coach with a background in psychology, Constance Dierickx is the author of High-Stakes Leadership and the founder of a practice focused on helping leaders navigate transitions, mergers, crises, and high-stakes decisions. Her work specifically addresses the psychological risks that boards and organisations face when succession is mismanaged: the internal politics that metastasise when succession timelines become unclear, the leader attachment that prevents outgoing CEOs from genuinely releasing control, and the cultural signals that an organisation sends to its people through the quality of its succession process.

Dierickx's LinkedIn presence reflects an active, engaged practitioner who regularly shares substantive perspectives on leadership transitions. Her willingness to address the human dimensions of succession, the fear, the ego, the grief, and the relief that leaders experience through major transitions, makes her one of the more distinctive voices on this list.

CATEGORY 5: The Coaching and Development Community

These eight executive coaches and leadership development specialists work directly with CEO successors, incoming leaders, and the people around them to ensure that transitions are supported at the human level rather than simply managed at the governance level.

29. Muriel Maignan Wilkins

As co-founder of Paravis Partners and co-author of Own the Room, Muriel Maignan Wilkins is a Harvard Business Review contributing editor and host of the HBR podcast Coaching Real Leaders, which is one of the most listened-to leadership podcasts globally. Her work with executives navigating new leadership roles, including CEO transitions, provides a practitioner's-eye view of the invisible work that makes or breaks a succession: the self-management, the relationship building with a board that did not choose you, and the identity shift required to lead at the top rather than through expertise.

Wilkins is distinctive among the voices on this list for her explicit focus on leaders from underrepresented groups navigating succession into CEO-level roles. Her coaching work addresses the specific dynamics that women and executives of colour encounter in succession processes and in the early phases of a new CEO tenure, dynamics that generic succession frameworks rarely surface or address.

30. Jennifer Garvey Berger

As co-founder of Cultivating Leadership and author of Changing on the Job and Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, Jennifer Garvey Berger brings a developmental psychology lens to CEO succession that is rare in the governance literature. Drawing on the constructive-developmental tradition, her writing explores the idea that leadership capability is not just a set of skills that can be developed but a set of meaning-making structures that must evolve. A CEO who has not developed the mental complexity required to lead at the enterprise level will struggle regardless of what skills development they receive.

Garvey Berger's framework is particularly relevant for boards thinking about longer-term successor development, the cultivation of internal candidates who are not yet ready but could be with the right developmental experiences over three to five years. Her work invites organisations to ask not just 'can this person do the job?' but 'is this person developing in the direction the job will require?'

31. Alisa Cohn

An executive coach who works with CEOs and senior executives at many of the world's most successful companies including Google, Dell, and DraftKings, Alisa Cohn is the author of From Start-Up to Grown-Up, which addresses the specific challenge of helping founders transition their leadership style as their organisations scale. Her work on what she calls the startup trap, the patterns that made a founder successful in the early stages of a company that become liabilities as the organisation grows, is directly relevant to boards managing founder succession.

Cohn is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes and has been named the number one startup coach in the world by Global Gurus Research. Her perspective is grounded, honest, and accessible, and she brings a startup and scale-up lens to succession conversations that are often dominated by voices from the large-cap public company world.

32. Antoine Tirard

As founder of NexTalent, a Paris-based talent management consultancy, and a former head of talent management at both LVMH and Novartis, Antoine Tirard is one of the most respected practitioners in the European and global talent development community. A regular contributor to INSEAD Knowledge and The Conference Board, his work on succession planning in global organisations addresses the specific complexities that arise when succession pipelines span multiple geographies, ownership structures, and cultural contexts.

Tirard is actively engaged on LinkedIn, regularly sharing substantive perspectives on leadership development, CHRO effectiveness, and the evolving role of talent management in governance. His co-authored book Disrupt Your Career, written with Claire Harbour-Lyell, reflects his sustained interest in how leaders navigate significant transitions. His European perspective adds a dimension to succession conversations that are often dominated by US-centric research and frameworks.

33. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

As CEO of 20-first and one of the world's leading authorities on gender balance in organisations, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is not primarily known as a CEO succession expert. She is on this list because she has done more than almost anyone else to surface the structural reasons why women are systematically underrepresented in succession pipelines and what organisations can concretely do about it. Her book Why Women Mean Business and her regular writing on leadership diversity have been foundational contributions to the field of pipeline equity.

Wittenberg-Cox's work is particularly relevant in the current governance environment, where investor scrutiny of CEO pipeline diversity has intensified significantly. Her challenge to boards is direct: diversity in the final succession decision is a lagging indicator. The leading indicator is the composition of the development programmes, stretch assignments, and senior exposures that are offered to leaders three to five levels below the CEO today.

34. Diane Gherson

As former Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, and one of the most influential HR leaders of her generation, Diane Gherson brings a CHRO's perspective to CEO succession that is grounded in having managed the human capital strategies of one of the world's most complex organisations. Her work on the transformation of IBM's talent practices during a period of enormous technological and structural change is a case study in how succession planning must adapt when an organisation's entire operating model is in flux.

Gherson's current writing and speaking focuses on the intersection of AI and talent management, including the implications of AI-driven change for the leadership capabilities that successor development programmes need to cultivate. Her perspective is that the competencies required of CEOs in 2026 and beyond are materially different from those that defined excellent leadership a decade ago, and succession processes that have not updated their success profiles accordingly are selecting for a world that no longer exists.

35. Suzanne Bates

As CEO of Bates Communications and creator of the Bates Executive Presence Index, Suzanne Bates has built a research-based framework for understanding the communication and presence attributes that most strongly predict whether a senior executive can command the trust, credibility, and followership that a CEO role demands. Her work is directly applicable to succession: boards regularly struggle to articulate why a candidate who looks excellent on paper fails to create conviction in a room, and the Bates Executive Presence Index provides a structured vocabulary for that conversation.

Bates is an active and engaged voice on LinkedIn, where she shares substantive perspectives on executive communication, leadership presence, and the development of CEO-ready candidates. Her research has been influential with CHROs and talent management professionals trying to bridge the gap between traditional competency frameworks and the intangible qualities that actually determine whether an incoming CEO builds trust quickly or slowly.

36. Marna van der Merwe

As a subject matter expert in talent management and succession planning at AIHR, the Academy to Innovate HR, Marna van der Merwe is one of the most practically accessible voices in the CEO succession space, regularly contributing to the AIHR blog which is read by hundreds of thousands of HR professionals globally. Her work translates complex succession frameworks into operational guidance for HR teams who are building succession processes for the first time or overhauling ones that are not working.

Van der Merwe's insight that defining what good looks like for the CEO role requires objectivity and close alignment with the organisation's goals and values is a useful challenge to the tendency of boards and CHROs to default to the outgoing CEO's profile rather than thinking rigorously about what the organisation actually needs next. Her emphasis on evidence-based succession practice and regular talent reviews makes her one of the more practitioner-grounded voices on this list.

CATEGORY 6: The Board Governance Specialists

These seven practitioners work specifically at the intersection of board governance and CEO succession, helping directors understand and discharge their succession responsibilities more effectively.

37. Giovanna Galli

A member of Spencer Stuart's global board and CEO practice and one of the co-authors of the 2025 Harvard Business Review piece on why boards are engaging in three particularly problematic succession behaviours, Giovanna Galli brings a European and global governance perspective to CEO succession conversations that are often dominated by US market dynamics. Her work advises boards on how to move past the safe succession instinct, the tendency to select internally known, low-controversy candidates, and towards selections that genuinely position the organisation for its strategic future.

Galli's perspective is shaped by extensive work with boards in multiple geographies, giving her a comparative understanding of how succession governance differs across markets, ownership structures, and board cultures. Her LinkedIn activity reflects someone actively engaged with current governance debates, sharing substantive commentary on board practices, executive assessment, and the relationship between CEO selection and strategic renewal.

38. Kate Hurley

As a partner in Spencer Stuart's board and CEO practice and another co-author of the 2025 HBR piece with Claudius Hildebrand and Giovanna Galli, Kate Hurley has built her practice around helping boards navigate the specific challenge of selecting a CEO for the strategic context the organisation actually faces rather than the one it faced when the current leader was appointed. Her work on CEO assessment and selection addresses the tendency of succession committees to weight past performance and familiar profiles over future potential and adaptive capability.

Hurley's writing and advisory work is grounded in the reality that most CEO failures in the first three years are failures of fit between the leader and the moment, not failures of competence. Her practical contribution to the field is a set of frameworks for helping boards think more precisely about the strategic requirements of a given CEO context and assess candidates against those requirements rather than against a generic leadership profile.

39. Tierney Remick

As co-leader of Korn Ferry's Board and CEO Services practice, Tierney Remick works with boards on director refreshment, succession planning, and the board dynamics that either support or undermine effective CEO transitions. Her observation that building a board for succession is intricate and complex reflects her understanding that the governance infrastructure around succession, not just the process itself, determines the quality of the outcome.

Remick's current emphasis in 2025 and 2026 is on the pipeline problem: the shrinking number of senior leaders who actively want to step into a CEO role, and the implications of that trend for organisations that are not investing proactively in making the role attractive, developmental, and well-supported. Her work with boards on how to engage potential internal successors as genuine developmental priorities rather than positional backups is practical and forward-looking.

40. Nels Olson

As a leader in Korn Ferry's North American board and CEO practice, Nels Olson is one of the most senior board advisory practitioners in the United States. His work with boards emphasises the importance of keeping succession on the agenda continuously rather than treating it as a response to a specific event, and he has been a consistent voice in the governance community for the view that the board chair bears the primary responsibility for ensuring that succession planning actually happens rather than simply appearing on committee checklists.

Olson's advice that smart boards are always grooming at least three or four potential successors simultaneously, not as a sign of distrust in the current CEO but as a fundamental governance responsibility, is one of the clearest statements of modern succession doctrine available. His regular engagement with Korn Ferry's research outputs and his willingness to share direct, specific guidance on succession process design make him a valuable voice in the field.

41. Michael Hyter

As President and CEO of The Executive Leadership Council, the preeminent membership organisation for Black executives at the level of vice president and above, Michael Hyter brings a perspective on CEO succession that most governance commentators either miss or treat superficially. His work on board oversight of talent strategy and succession planning addresses the question of what boards must do differently to develop the diverse talent pipelines that will produce the CEO candidates of the next decade.

Hyter's LinkedIn presence reflects an executive deeply engaged with the intersection of governance, human capital, and business strategy. His consistent message to boards is that talent oversight, including succession, works best when it is connected explicitly to business outcomes and when the board regularly asks not just whether a succession plan exists but whether it is producing a pipeline that reflects the breadth of capable leaders in the organisation and in the world.

42. Claudia Pici Morris

As a CEO and Board Succession Solutions leader at Korn Ferry for North America, Claudia Pici Morris has built her practice around the specific challenge of finding board directors who can contribute meaningfully to succession governance, not just experienced executives but people with the T-shaped profile, deep expertise in one area combined with genuine cross-functional understanding, that effective board membership requires.

Pici Morris' perspective on board refreshment and succession is that organisations consistently undervalue intrinsic traits, curiosity, nimbleness, and the ability to synthesise diverse perspectives in favour of credentials and prior board experience. Her work asks a question that succession processes rarely ask: are the directors overseeing CEO succession actually well-equipped to do that work, or has board composition itself become a source of succession risk?

43. Stephen Drotter

As CEO of Drotter Human Resources, the global network specialising in CEO succession, executive assessment, and organisation design, Stephen Drotter is one of the original architects of The Leadership Pipeline, the framework he co-developed with Ram Charan and Jim Noel that has become the most widely used model for thinking about how leadership capability must evolve as people move through organisational levels toward the CEO role. His work at GE, where he was one of the original designers of GE's succession planning process, established many of the practices that other organisations later adopted as best practice.

Drotter's foundational insight is that the leap to CEO is not simply a bigger version of being a business unit leader. It requires a fundamental change in what the individual values, how they use their time, and what kind of work they consider genuinely important. Succession processes that fail to develop candidates for this transition, rather than simply evaluating them against it, are setting up both the individual and the organisation for unnecessary difficulty.

CATEGORY 7: The Independent and Emerging Voices

These seven practitioners represent the broader and more diverse intellectual community around CEO succession, including independent researchers, coaches, and consultants who bring perspectives that large firm advisors often cannot.

44. Mike Myatt

As chairman and founder of N2Growth, one of the world's leading global leadership advisory firms, Mike Myatt has built a substantial body of writing on CEO succession, board governance, and executive development that is distinguished by its willingness to challenge the status quo in succession practice. His work argues consistently that organisations that approach succession as a governance compliance exercise rather than a genuine leadership investment will consistently underperform those that treat succession as a strategic priority.

Myatt's LinkedIn presence is extensive, and his firm's regular publications on succession planning challenges and opportunities are among the most widely circulated in the independent consulting space. His perspective is that the most important question in succession is not who but for what: what kind of organisation do you want to become, and therefore what kind of leadership does that future require?

45. Nancy May

As founder and president of BoardBench Companies, a governance consulting group focused on board quality, continuity, and director placement, Nancy May brings the perspective of the independent board governance specialist to CEO succession. Her work, cited in major business publications including Fortune, addresses the risks that come with both internal and external CEO candidates and provides boards with a practical framework for honest assessment rather than retrospective rationalisation.

May's insight that internal candidates can be outstanding at functional roles without having developed the enterprise-wide leadership perspective that the CEO role requires is one of the most important calibrations in succession practice. Her work helps boards distinguish between candidates who are ready for the role now, candidates who could be ready with the right developmental support, and candidates who will struggle regardless of how much support they receive.

46. Yvonne Evers

As founder and CEO of SUCCESSIONapp, a SaaS company providing succession planning tools for boards and executives, Yvonne Evers has built her practice around the operational mechanics of succession planning in small and mid-sized organisations that do not have the resources of a Fortune 500 company but face equally important succession risks. Her work, grounded in decades of HR consulting experience, addresses the particular vulnerabilities of organisations where a single leader's departure can be existential rather than disruptive.

Evers is a consistent and active voice on LinkedIn, where she regularly shares practical guidance on succession readiness, board governance, and the emergency planning dimension of CEO succession that most organisations defer until it is too late. Her specific work on credit union succession planning reflects the breadth of organisational contexts in which succession is a genuine and underserved challenge.

47. Jim Schleckser

As CEO of the CEO Project and host of the Lazy CEO Podcast, Jim Schleckser has built one of the most accessible and practically grounded communities for CEOs thinking about succession, either their own or their organisation's. His coaching programme, which combines individual coaching sessions, quarterly group meetings, and access to peer CEO networks, addresses the isolation that many CEOs experience when navigating succession for the first time and the practical knowledge gaps that no formal training programme fully closes.

Schleckser's work is particularly focused on founder succession: helping business founders and family business owners think clearly about what it means to hand control to someone else, both the practical governance dimensions and the personal and identity dimensions that make founder succession one of the most emotionally complex transitions in organisational life.

48. Rebecca Ray

As executive vice president of human capital at The Conference Board and one of the most senior HR research leaders in the world, Rebecca Ray oversees research programmes that include the Conference Board's work on CEO succession, CHRO effectiveness, and the evolving role of human capital in corporate governance. Her work on the CHRO's role in CEO succession is particularly timely, as boards increasingly look to their CHRO as a primary advisor on succession readiness, candidate assessment, and transition management.

Ray's LinkedIn presence reflects a senior practitioner actively engaged with the most pressing talent challenges facing organisations globally. Her perspective on succession emphasises the systemic dimension: succession is not a process but a culture, and organisations that build the habits, conversations, and assessments that make succession continuous are structurally advantaged over those that treat it episodically.

49. Jeremy Hanson

As a senior leader in Heidrick and Struggles' CEO and board practice and contributor to the firm's annual CEO and Board Confidence Monitor research, Jeremy Hanson works at the intersection of board governance and executive assessment. His October 2024 piece on beating the succession planning paradox, examining why boards consistently underinvest in succession even when they know it is important, is one of the more incisive analyses of the governance psychology that drives succession neglect.

Hanson's research found that only 26 percent of CEOs and board members describe CEO succession as a top priority that is genuinely treated as such, a finding that sits in painful tension with the near-universal acknowledgement that succession is the most important decision a board makes. His work on why that gap persists and what governance changes are most likely to close it is practical and empirically grounded.

50. Jonno White

Jonno White is the CEO of Consult Clarity and a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, facilitator, and keynote speaker who has worked with executive teams across Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, and beyond. The bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally and addresses the difficult conversations that leadership transitions inevitably surface, Jonno brings a practitioner's lens to what the thought leaders on this list are writing about. His work facilitating executive offsites, running leadership team workshops, and coaching senior leaders through change positions him not as a succession planning adviser but as the person organisations bring in to do the cultural and relational work that good CEO transitions require.

When a new CEO arrives, the team dynamics, communication patterns, and decision-making cultures inherited from the previous leader either accelerate or impede the transition. Jonno's work with leadership teams at this inflection point, using frameworks including Working Genius, DISC, and StrengthsFinder to surface how the team currently works and how it needs to evolve, addresses the human dimension of succession that governance frameworks rarely reach. To book Jonno for your team's next offsite or workshop, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Compiling a list of 50 genuine voices on CEO succession means making difficult decisions about people who have made significant contributions to the field. Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek would appear on most lists touching on leadership and culture, and their work on vulnerability, organisational psychology, and human motivation has influenced how many executives and boards think about leadership character. We deliberately moved past these household names to surface fresher voices and practitioners more directly engaged with succession as a specific discipline.

Marshall Goldsmith, the world-renowned executive coach whose book Succession: Are You Ready? is one of the most direct treatments of CEO succession from a coaching perspective, was considered and set aside not because his contributions are minor but because the list benefits from voices who are actively building their profile in the field. Noel Tichy, the University of Michigan professor whose book Succession remains one of the most challenging analytical treatments of succession process failures, and who has advised on more than 30 CEO transitions including at General Motors, is worth reading for anyone who wants to understand the common failures that even well-intentioned succession processes replicate.

Common Mistakes Leaders Make in CEO Succession

CEO succession fails in predictable ways. The most common mistake is conflating urgency with readiness: organisations that wait until succession becomes urgent are forced to choose among candidates who were developed for roles the organisation used to have rather than the role it now needs to fill. By the time urgency arrives, the window for genuine development has closed.

The second most common mistake is treating succession as the CEO's responsibility when it is, constitutionally and strategically, the board's. Many boards allow the outgoing CEO to shape the shortlist, manage the process, and effectively determine the outcome. This creates a predictable pattern: the successor often inherits not just the role but the strategic assumptions, relational loyalties, and cultural commitments of their predecessor, which makes genuine strategic renewal enormously difficult. The best successions involve a board that is genuinely independent in its assessment, willing to consider candidates the outgoing CEO would not have chosen.

A third common mistake is selecting for the last crisis rather than the next challenge. Boards that recently survived a financial downturn tend to select successors with financial discipline as their primary attribute. Boards that recently navigated a cultural scandal tend to select successors with high interpersonal sensitivity and communications skill. These are reasonable instincts, but they routinely produce leaders who are well-equipped for the environment that preceded their appointment and under-equipped for the environment they will actually face.

A fourth mistake, identified persistently in the research of Ron Carucci and others, is selecting the right person and then failing to set them up to succeed. The board's job does not end at the appointment. The transition itself, the first six months of genuine integration, stakeholder relationship building, and strategic orientation, is where a disproportionate number of CEO failures are seeded. Boards that invest in the transition as carefully as they invest in the selection consistently see better outcomes.

Finally, organisations frequently confuse succession planning with succession documentation. A plan that is written once and filed is not a plan: it is a record that a plan once existed. The organisations with the strongest succession outcomes treat succession as a continuous process, maintaining it as a standing board agenda item, conducting regular talent reviews, keeping assessment criteria current with the organisation's evolving strategy, and actively creating the experiences and exposures that develop their internal pipeline.

Implementation Guide: Taking Action on CEO Succession

The first step is honest assessment of where your succession process actually stands. Not where it stands on paper, but whether, as Nels Olson of Korn Ferry puts it, you could name specific people and their readiness level if the board were asked tomorrow. Many organisations discover at this point that their succession plan is aspirational rather than executable.

The second step is defining what the next CEO role actually requires, not what the current role requires, and not what the last transition required. The strategic environment in which your next CEO will operate may be materially different from the one your current CEO navigated. Boards that are doing this work well are engaging with scenario planning, asking what leadership attributes would be essential if the organisation faced specific future conditions, and using those scenarios to evaluate whether internal candidates have the range of capability the future is likely to demand.

The third step is active investment in the pipeline. Identify two to three internal candidates who could be realistic successors within three to five years, and build a specific development agenda for each. This means cross-functional exposure, stretch assignments in roles outside their home function, board-level visibility, and access to external coaching. The research is consistent: internal successors who have been deliberately developed significantly outperform those who simply occupied a role adjacent to the CEO until a succession event occurred.

The fourth step is emergency succession readiness. Most organisations have emergency succession plans that are neither current nor executable. A test worth running is simple: could your board execute the plan tomorrow morning if the CEO became unavailable tonight? If the answer requires more than a brief consultation of a named document and a phone call to a named individual, the plan is a document rather than a plan.

The fifth step is regular governance maintenance. Succession belongs on the board agenda at least quarterly, not as a crisis response but as a standing governance item. The most successful boards treat succession with the same rigour they give to financial reporting: continuous, data-driven, and tied to the organisation's strategic direction.

If you would like to bring an executive team offsite focused on leadership culture, succession readiness, and the team dynamics that will either accelerate or complicate your next transition, Jonno White, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries, facilitates sessions for leadership teams across Australia and globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CEO succession planning and why does it matter?

CEO succession planning is the process by which a board of directors and the organisation ensure that a capable leader can step into the CEO role whether through a planned retirement, an unexpected departure, or a strategic decision to change direction. According to research from Harvard Business Review, poorly managed CEO transitions wipe out close to one trillion dollars in market value annually across S&P 1500 companies. Most organisations have inadequate plans despite the scale of the risk.

How long should CEO succession planning take?

Research consistently supports a five-year minimum horizon for succession planning that genuinely develops internal candidates. Russell Reynolds Associates found that the most successful long-term succession plans operate with at least a five-year time horizon, yet only 8 percent of board directors in their 2025 survey reported planning that far ahead. Most boards focus on one to three years, which is insufficient to develop candidates who are genuinely ready rather than simply available.

Should boards prefer internal or external CEO candidates?

The evidence strongly favours internal candidates where genuine internal options exist. Russell Reynolds found that 68 percent of global CEO appointments in 2025 were internal candidates. Boris Groysberg's research at Harvard Business School on executive performance portability suggests that the context-dependent nature of leadership effectiveness means external star candidates frequently underperform expectations. However, external candidates can be essential when the organisation requires a strategic transformation that insiders cannot credibly drive or when the internal pipeline has been neglected.

What is the board's role in CEO succession?

CEO succession is the board's primary fiduciary responsibility, not a management task the board oversees. Boards that allow the outgoing CEO to manage the succession process on their behalf tend to produce successors in the predecessor's image rather than successors equipped for the organisation's future. The board chair, specifically, bears accountability for ensuring succession stays on the agenda, that assessment processes are rigorous and independent, and that the transition itself is actively supported rather than left to the incoming CEO to navigate alone.

What role does the CHRO play in CEO succession?

The CHRO plays a critical and often underutilised role in CEO succession. Research from the Conference Board and HR Policy Association found that boards with stronger succession practices are significantly more likely to have engaged their CHRO as a genuine advisor in the process. The CHRO can structure objective assessment processes, maintain confidentiality, facilitate board alignment, and ensure that development plans for internal candidates are actually executed. The CHRO's role is to be a process steward who enables the board to lead rather than a gatekeeper who controls access.

How was this list compiled?

The 50 people on this list were selected based on their genuine, sustained contribution to the field of CEO succession across multiple dimensions: published research, books, and frameworks; active practitioner engagement with current questions; geographic and disciplinary diversity; and a commitment to challenging conventional wisdom rather than simply confirming it. The list deliberately prioritises mid-career and emerging voices alongside established names, with the goal of producing a resource that is both authoritative and genuinely fresher than the standard roundup of names that appear on every related list.

Can I hire someone to facilitate a leadership transition workshop or executive offsite for my team?

Yes. Jonno White, the bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with executive teams at precisely the human inflection points that CEO succession creates. Whether your team is preparing for a transition, navigating one, or working to build the kind of culture that will make the next transition smooth, Jonno facilitates sessions that are practical, evidence-based, and grounded in what genuinely changes how teams work. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's needs.

Final Thoughts

CEO succession is the moment where every decision a board has made about governance, culture, strategy, and talent comes into focus at once. It is also the moment that most boards feel least equipped to navigate, not because the decision is impossible to make well, but because the preparation required to make it well spans years rather than weeks.

The 50 thought leaders on this list are united not by a single methodology or a single answer but by a shared commitment to rigour, honesty, and the kind of thinking that helps organisations make their most consequential leadership decisions with clarity rather than anxiety. Follow them. Read their research. Let their frameworks challenge your assumptions about what succession is, who is responsible for it, and what genuinely excellent preparation looks like.

The organisations that will navigate the succession wave of the late 2020s most successfully are the ones building their pipelines now. Not when a specific CEO announces a departure date, but now, while there is still time to develop, test, and genuinely prepare the leaders who will carry the organisation forward.

Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant and the bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally. Organisations can hire Jonno to facilitate executive offsites, run leadership team workshops, or deliver keynotes at the leadership culture and team dynamics intersection that CEO succession always surfaces. To book Jonno for your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 35 Powerful Thought Leaders on Leadership in PE and VC

The most significant risk factor a PE firm can experience is an unplanned CEO transition. Unplanned CEO transitions are among the most expensive events a PE firm can face, combining disruption, lost momentum, and the cost of the search itself. The firms that have built systematic approaches to leadership assessment, development, and succession are the ones consistently outperforming their peers. In venture capital, the dynamic is different but equally urgent. Early-stage founders are often hired for their vision and their ability to get a company off the ground. The leadership skills required to scale a company from 10 people to 100, or from 100 to 1,000, are categorically different.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-pe-vc