Saturday, September 26, 2026
Jaguar Land Rover has opened a voluntary programme covering about 4,000 salaried and management roles. A voluntary round is humane, cheaper to run and legally cleaner than the alternative. It is also the one method of reducing headcount in which the employer does not decide who goes.
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.
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.
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.
Private capital has spent three years buying HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors at multiples the trades have never seen. The thesis is sound, the integration is harder than the model assumed, and the second wave is arriving at higher prices.
A generation of operators is retiring off land that has appreciated beyond what a successor can finance. The capital filling the gap has a different time horizon and different intentions.
Millions of small businesses are owned by people at or past retirement age, and most have no succession plan. The scramble to keep them alive is reshaping local economies.
Employee stock ownership plans spent decades as an ideological argument. They are being reconsidered as something plainer: a buyer who is already on site when no other buyer appears.
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.