How Yahoo Changed the Guard

Yang persisted, Bartz reconsidered, and early in 2009 she became Yahoo’s president and chief executive officer. Most companies executing a CEO succession under pressure are not so lucky.

Nearly every management guru worthy of the name has written about CEO succession, and for once the savants have achieved near consensus: most companies do it badly. It seems that corporate chief executives and their boards treat succession the way that many people treat estate planning. It’s unpleasant to think about, so they put it off , often until a crisis forces their hand.

Briefings asked four thought leaders in the fi eld of leadership and executive development to disclose what counsel they might have given to Yahoo’s directors before they began a search and to Bartz after she accepted their off er. More broadly, they were asked to share their perspectives and insights on how companies can better prepare for CEO succession, in good times and bad.

Although Yahoo’s choice of Bartz was not without critics, she is unquestionably a capable executive, having earned her stripes in the turnaround of Autodesk, a struggling company known for one product — the Autocad design software — when she arrived, now a computeraided design powerhouse with a market cap of about $6 billion. That Yahoo was able to lure her out of semiretirement is all the more fortunate, given the company’s lack of a coherent succession plan.