This week the national carrier announced yet another leadership transition. An acting chief executive stepping down, the company secretary stepping up in an acting capacity, a substantive search promised.
Our founders’ forum lit up. One member traced the cycles of which discipline gets the corner office: legal ruled once, gave way to finance, marketing and operations, and now returns. Another argued the business needs start-up energy at the top, not a steady hand.
This column is not about the airline. It is about the mirror it holds up to every founder and custodian. I kept asking the founder’s question: if I owned this business, how would I have managed this transition? The founder in this case is a government, whose shareholders change with every election.
The questions underneath face every builder. When do you know it is time to exit? And who is the right person for the season the business is actually in?
Leaders almost never leave too early. We leave too late. The cruellest part: the person overstaying was once the best tool the enterprise had.
Yesterday’s best tool becomes today’s wrong tool without changing at all. The business changed. Fit for purpose is a moving target, and the occupant of the seat is usually the last person invited to notice.
Call it the overstay tax. It is the price an enterprise pays for every season a leader remains past usefulness. Decisions slow because everything still routes through one desk. Successors stall because the seat they were promised never empties.
Strategy calcifies around the last good idea, defended now as doctrine. The invoice never carries the leader’s name, which is why the leader rarely sees it.
So how do you know? The operating system this column keeps returning to offers five mirrors.
Strategically: Can I still think and execute at the level this business now demands? Capacity thins. Decision quality dips. Health intervenes without asking permission. Sometimes the leader’s own reputation becomes a risk the balance sheet can no longer carry.
In mindset: Am I governing today’s business with the software of old victories? Past success is the most convincing liar a founder ever meets because it was once true.
Emotionally: Who is making my decisions, my judgment or my fatigue, my fear or my grievance?
Socially: Have the founder and the business become one person? When every room addresses you as the company, letting go stops feeling like a transition and starts feeling like social death.
Spiritually: Is this still a mission, or has it quietly become a throne? The seat answers to different gods than the calling did.
Then comes the court, because no leader overstays alone. Around every past-date founder stands a circle with excellent reasons to say nothing. Advisers whose relevance retires the day you do.
Board members who benefit from proximity and have learned that truth is career-limiting. Family whose income, and pride, ride on your remaining. Everyone knows the limit has been reached. Everyone is paid, in money or reputation, not to say it. The louder your cheerleaders, the later your exit.
The elders say that when the music changes, so does the dance. A business changes its music every few seasons, and either the dancer changes or the dancer must be changed.
Even the choice of successor is a season question. A lawyer’s order suits one chapter, an engineer’s invention another, and a turnaround calls for founder energy that no title guarantees. The discipline on the CV matters less than whether its music matches the company’s current song.
The paradox does not resolve. Leave too early and the enterprise can lose its fire before the creed has set. Leave too late and it loses its future while applauding you politely. Sometimes the honest answer is not to leave but to pivot: to change seats before the company must change you.
Which brings us to a board meeting no founder ever schedules. One attendee, one agenda item, both of them you. Hold it anyway, once a year, before the market, the board or the ballot convenes it for you. An exit is either an act of leadership or an act of nature. The first you design.
The second is done to you, late, expensively and in public.
The last thing a founder builds is the door he leaves through.