04.01.08
This is the latest thinking from the Harvard Business Review. In a study of 1,800 successions, Professor Joseph L Bower found that internal appointees performed better than those from outside
This is the latest thinking from the Harvard Business Review. In a study of 1,800 successions, Harvard’s Professor Joseph L Bower found that internal appointees performed significantly better than those from outside.
An outsider's perspective
The only trouble is that in order to do really well these internal candidates also need to have an outsider’s perspective. Outsiders can see what needs changing, but they don’t have the insider information to be able to push the changes through to the extent that insider’s can.
Professor Bower’s solution to this Catch 22 is for organisations to nurture what he calls “inside-outside leaders”: people who come from within but who have spent time away from the centre of the organisation, for example through managing an offshoot company.
The importance of 30...
One more thing though: these potential leaders need to be spotted by the time they are thirty. This gives them the time to mature to the point where they can manage a whole business and still leaves them with enough time to come back to head up the organisation and use what they have learned.