On 1 September Apple changed its CEO without a single jolt, in the same year that CEO turnover hits record highs across the major stock indices. Between those two stories lies a lesson many Spanish companies have yet to learn.
This month Tim Cook handed over the running of Apple to John Ternus, an engineer who joined the company in 2001 and has led its hardware engineering since 2021. The announcement came in April, with the unanimous approval of the board; Cook spent the summer working side by side with his successor and remains in the company today as executive chairman. What stands out is not the change but the absence of drama: a three-trillion-dollar company has replaced the person who ran it for fifteen years and the market barely blinked. That does not happen by chance. It happens because someone started preparing it a long time ago.
The contrast with the rest of the market is telling. According to the Russell Reynolds global index, 77 new CEOs were appointed across the major stock indices in the first quarter of 2026, the highest first-quarter figure in at least eight years. And the Conference Board adds a number worth reading slowly: among S&P 500 companies, external appointments rose from 18% to 33% in a single year, while internal promotions fell below 70% for the first time in almost a decade. Boards are looking outside more and more, and increasingly asking for someone who has already been a chief executive. In plain terms: many organisations discover, when the moment comes, that they have no successor ready inside and go out to buy experience on the market, at emergency prices.
In Spain, September has brought the usual post-summer wave of appointments: new general managers, new chief operating officers, new members of executive committees. It is a familiar ritual. But the relevant question is not who has been appointed; it is how many of those decisions were prepared and how many were forced by a departure. Our experience is clear: in most mid-sized companies and in a good share of family businesses, succession is treated as an event — something that happens when someone leaves — rather than as a discipline. The consequence is that the search starts the day the vacancy opens, in a hurry, with the business already suffering and in the worst possible position to choose well.
Treating succession as a discipline is nothing exotic. It means knowing today who could fill each critical position within twelve or twenty-four months, what they still lack, and which gaps can only be covered from outside. It is a map of people, not an organisation chart. It is development plans built on real assignments, not courses. And above all it is an honest external view, because the assessment a team makes of itself is systematically generous. Apple did nothing more than that: identify, expose, test and decide in good time.
The uncomfortable part is that succession forces whoever is in charge to think about their own exit, and forces the board to assess people it is fond of. Avoiding it is human. That is why it cannot depend on anyone’s goodwill: it has to be institutionalised, on the board’s agenda every year, with an outside voice asking the questions nobody inside will ask. In the family business the demand is twofold, because the professional handover comes on top of the founder’s, and what is at stake there is not just a position but the continuity of a culture.
At Ad hoc we say it plainly: we are often called when the vacancy is already open, and we would rather be called before. Executive search as a fire brigade works, but a well-prepared succession makes the search unnecessary or, when it is needed, far better: you know precisely what you are looking for, you compare internal candidates with the market with the same rigour, and you offer the incoming leader a transition instead of a cliff edge. The best appointments we have taken part in had one thing in common: they surprised no one.
