We examine CEO turnover and succession planning using a unique and highly comprehensive data set from the company exechange. Exechange applies a novel methodology that evaluates the circumstances surrounding a CEO departure to determine the degree to which the turnover event might be voluntary or involuntary (called the Push-Out Score). With this data, we are able to provide new statistics on CEO departures and fresh analysis in three areas of succession planning — sensitivity of turnover to performance, board preparedness to name a successor, and the performance of internal and external successors — to arrive at a more current assessment of the quality of CEO succession planning among publicly traded companies in the U.S.
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