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.
John Ternus took over Apple on Monday. Tim Cook moved to executive chairman and, by several accounts, kept the company's relationships with Washington and Beijing. The handover says less about two men than about a job that no longer fits inside one post.
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.
The advice to delegate more is sound and incomplete. A manager who has never done the task cannot specify it, cannot judge the output, and cannot tell whether the person is struggling.
Information travelling up an organisation is edited at every layer by someone with an interest in how it reads. Skipping a level is the cheapest correction available, and most executives run it badly.
A returning employee arrives with a known record, an existing network and no ramp. The obstacles are almost entirely procedural, and most of them are self-imposed.
Companies retired the annual appraisal for good reasons and assumed ongoing conversation would fill the gap. Where nobody built the replacement, employees now go a year with no record of how they are doing.
Companies spend heavily to attract people and hand them a laptop and a login. The departures that follow eighteen months later were mostly determined in the first three weeks.
Co-leadership is being used again to bridge a succession, retain a rival or cover a gap nobody wants to name. It works where the split is genuine and fails where it was a way of avoiding a choice.
Most reorganisations are announced because a specific, uncomfortable decision was available and nobody wanted to make it. The chart changes, the decision waits, and everyone is busy for two quarters.
The compressed week arrived as a statement about work and is settling as an operational question, adopted in the departments where the arithmetic holds and quietly abandoned where it does not.
Boards have become disciplined about naming a successor for the chief executive. Two levels down, where most operating knowledge actually sits, the same companies have no plan and frequently no list.
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.
The flattening that removed a layer of management left survivors with teams of fifteen and twenty. Organisations are now setting explicit spans, and discovering the number they can defend is smaller than the one they have.
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.
Companies spend heavily to source candidates externally while making internal movement quietly difficult. The organizations fixing the second are finding they need less of the first.
Dropping degree requirements began as a tight-labor-market expedient. Several years of retention and performance data have turned it into policy.
Employers describe a scarcity of qualified candidates as an external condition, as though qualification were weather. It is a thing they used to produce and stopped.
After several years of celebrated flattening, organizations are rediscovering what middle management was for, and rebuilding it under new names.
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.
An improvised job created for trusted individuals is acquiring job descriptions, levels and career paths. What it is becoming depends heavily on what problem it was created to solve.
Companies that once waited for a crisis to bring in operational leadership are now hiring chief operating officers years earlier, and the founders pushing hardest for it are the experienced ones.
Disclosure laws were written to affect job postings. Their most significant effect has been inside the building, on conversations managers were never trained to have.
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.
Speed has become the default virtue in hiring. It is the wrong one, and the companies quietly ignoring it are building better institutions.
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.