CEO succession
Open-knowledge reference entry
CEO succession is the process by which boards of directors of an organization ensure that it can transition to a new CEO when their existing CEO retires or can no longer carry out their CEO position. It is a part of succession planning to ensure continuity in leadership from one person to the next holding the CEO position.
Commercial importance
CEO succession is one of key functions of a board of directors. Changing the head of an enterprise impacts company culture, board/CEO relations, and perceptions from multiple constituencies inside and outside the business. The disruption that occurs can impact performance in a positive, neutral or negative manner. Successful companies manage this process well in advance with a concerted set of processes and milestones. Effective CEO succession requires a well-defined program that ensures a supply of highly capable candidates ready to assume the CEO position whether through an unexpected event or a planned transition. Success or failure of a CEO transition is influenced by a host of obvious and non-obvious factors, many of them of a social/psychological nature. How these factors are managed can have an enormous impact on the performance and status of the organization.
Regulatory opinion
In an October 2009 release, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission effectively removed the ordinary business exclusion defense used by companies reluctant to disclose their CEO succession process to shareholders.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5010310. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “CEO succession” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.