Saturday, September 5th, 2026
HDFC Bank's chief executive will not seek reappointment when his term expires in two months. Kotak Mahindra's declined an extension in June, with his three-year term ending on 31 December. Both were described as surprises. Both end dates have been known since the day each man started.
Public successions get covered as contests between people, because people are the visible part. The reliable predictor is duller: whether anyone ever wrote down how the handover was supposed to work.
Closed-end funds routinely trade below net asset value and mostly stay there. The persistence is the interesting part, because arbitrage cannot close a gap with no mechanism to force it.
Organisations deployed systems that produce work product and left unresolved who is answerable for it. The question arrives with the first consequential error.
Shareholder meetings were a scheduling exercise for decades. Rising opposition on pay, board composition and auditor tenure has made the outcome uncertain enough to require actual campaigning.
Employees adopted assistants on personal accounts long before any committee finished a review. Banning it moves the usage somewhere with no logging at all.
Employers reduced references to dates of employment to avoid liability, which removed the final verification step in hiring. What replaced it is informal, unrecorded and available only to the well-connected.
Software that acts on a company's behalf has to log in somewhere. The identity systems it logs into were designed around a person who can be fired, and the gap between those two facts is now a live governance problem.
Organisations have become very good at running trials and no better at ending them. A pilot that produces a clear positive result is the one most likely to be extended indefinitely, because extension is the decision nobody has to defend.
A quarterly ritual built around a hundred-page deck produces informed directors and almost no useful challenge. The format is the problem, and it is entirely within the board's power to change.
Boards once counted press mentions. Now they ask what AI assistants, search engines and diligence teams actually surface when an executive's name is entered.
Board seats at small and mid-sized companies were long treated as honors. Rising liability, activist attention and operational complexity are turning them back into jobs.
A planned executive absence used to read as weakness or exit. Boards are learning to treat it as a stress test the organization is supposed to pass.
Voluntary vagueness about where AI touches customers is becoming a liability. A simple disclosure norm would serve companies better than the silence they are defending.