Insight Articles | CEOサクセッション

What distinguishes an excellent general counsel from a good or merely acceptable one? To answer that question we recently mined information about more than 300 senior legal executives from among the thousands of management appraisals that we have conducted over the past several years.

Economies across Asia have been growing at unprecedented rates in recent years, and yet the supply of leaders to sustain that growth has been far harder to ramp up at anything like the same pace.

Why a long-term commitment to Latin America, despite its volatility and inevitable down cycles, is a winning strategy.

Just when it seemed that the role of energy CEO couldn’t become any more complex or demanding, it did. Macondo, Fukushima, Keystone, Iran, the Arab Spring, and the rise of unconventional plays offer only the sparest shorthand for the risks, regulatory blowback, and geopolitical uncertainties that now dominate the agenda of the energy chief executive.

Do you hope to become chief executive of a respected industrial company someday? Don’t assume that by vigorously applying your core strengths and learning everything there is to know about your industry you will climb the leadership ladder all the way to the C-suite.

Now more than ever before the public image of any organization is defined by how its CEO appears in public and personally expresses and embodies its corporate communications. At the same time the challenges facing corporate communications are ever more complex: not only are the requirements in terms of reporting obligations and transparency increasingly stringent but public interest in the CEO as an individual has also grown significantly in recent years.

“I wish I had known then what I know now.” That’s the frequent refrain we hear in candid conversations with a surprising number of C-level executives.

In most developed economies around the world, public sector intervention is becoming more widespread. This not only includes new and stricter regulations, but even the state actively going back into business, as illustrated on the cover of an issue of The Economist, “Leviathan Inc.” The big problem is that unless people decisions in the public sector are drastically reviewed, economic and social progress will be seriously at risk.

Egon Zehnder recently organized a forum to discuss the role and responsibilities of the CFO in dynamic environments. The global financial crisis put the spotlight on the CFO as never before.

The War for Talent has not fallen victim to the current financial crisis, argues Damien O’Brien, CEO and Chairman of Egon Zehnder.