Meet the Enemy
Boards often search for a leader to solve problems they have not yet fully named. The most useful search process helps leaders confront organizational realities before asking candidates to respond to them.
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Insights
Perspectives on executive search, governance, leadership transitions, and organizational change.
Leadership Challenges and Lessons
Observations from more than thirty years of executive search, organizational assessment, and leadership transitions.
Insights
Governance & Board Leadership
How boards and governing authorities navigate competing priorities, institutional realities, and leadership accountability.
The Mandate
Why successful executive searches begin by defining the choices before the organization — and what a clear mandate means for the leader who inherits it.
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Executive Search & Leadership Selection
Why effective searches start with institutional assessment and produce a choice among leadership strategies, not merely résumés.
What's Really Going On?
Why successful executive searches begin with an honest assessment of organizational realities rather than candidate credentials alone.
Read Essay →How to Recruit a Cabinet
An updated guide to cabinet recruitment: understanding an agency before searching, evaluating leadership strategies, and giving governors meaningful choices.
Read Essay →How to Choose a Nonprofit Executive Search Firm
Questions every board should ask about strategy, candidate reach, fees, assessment and the conditions for a successful leadership transition.
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Leadership Transitions & Succession
Preparing for chief executive transitions, founder succession, and the institution’s next chapter.
Successful Successions
The most successful leadership transitions begin well before a search formally starts. They require honest assessment, board alignment, and a clear understanding of what the next leader must actually inherit.
Read Essay →After the Founder
Why successful founder transitions require organizations to evolve from personality-driven leadership to institutional leadership — and what that shift demands of boards, staff, and successors alike.
Read Essay →A Tidal Wave Approaches
Lessons from Nonprofit Chief Executive Transitions. A case study in founder succession, board governance, and behavioral health executive search.
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Organizational Change & Culture
Understanding informal power, institutional resistance, culture, and the realities new leaders inherit.
Flying Monkeys
Every organization has informal networks, protected assumptions, and quiet resistance to change. Leadership transition work is strongest when it recognizes those dynamics rather than pretending they are outside the search.
Read Essay →Change Is Now
A new generation of leaders is stepping forward with different assumptions and a different relationship with institutions. Why governing boards must understand this shift before the search begins.
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