CEO Selection Mistakes

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Where do boards tend to get CEO selection wrong?

[00:00:03]>> Sometimes boards will choose what they wish for absent from really understanding the people. Well, I've been in situations in which um a really successful CEO was um from kind of one community and the board chose the next CEO trying to represent another community and the stamp was the same but the people characteristics were totally different. And so what they had was one dimension where they said, "Well, this is where this person comes from. This is what uh they know and they've got great depth. They've got stature. But when it came to the personal characteristics, how did they relate to people? How um interactive were they? What were their not so much work habits, but uh habits of sharing responsibility?

[00:00:54]They they they missed that and they didn't understand. If they'd asked the right questions, they could have seen warning flags that I think later on would have been helpful to them. There are some organizations that help you in searches. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this uh this organization that was started out of uh the UK out of UK intelligence called Hacklut. Are you familiar with them?

[00:01:17]>> I'm not. No.

[00:01:18]>> Okay. So, sidebar, we ought to have I can introduce you to them.

[00:01:22]>> They use uh intelligence methods to do checkings on people when the checkings are otherwise hard to get. So, they want to do it privately, discreetly. And what they're trying to figure out is is there something here which is a a red flag, >> right? And if we knew it, it would be disqualifying or it would be uh an issue we'd have to deal with. And how can we reassure ourselves that we don't see a red flag? And this happens more and more where, you know, someone's got some personal history which can either be embarrassing or disqualifying, but it's not on the surface. And so you want to do what you can to understand what is it you're missing. Especially when you choose somebody who's outside of your own network >> or part of different organizations or from a a different community, a different country or something. It's actually quite worthwhile. Um and it reveals a little bit about how insular any organization is when they choose another leader and they they want to be kind of validated that they've made the right choice. Uh and I I think this organization does really good work.