For PE Firms, Boards, and CEOs
McKinsey's synthesis of executive transition research finds that two years in, between 27 and 46 percent of leadership transitions are regarded as failures or disappointments. Almost none of those leaders were unqualified. They were qualified for the job they were hired to do, and unprepared for the system they walked into.
The people who chose them usually find out around month twelve, when it is expensive, visible, and no longer possible to handle quietly.
You should know by day ninety.
The Problem You Are Actually Buying
That failure rate is not a talent problem. It is a transition problem, and it lands on the balance sheet of the people who backed the seat.
For a PE firm, it is thesis erosion inside the hold period. For a board, it is a governance failure that shows up two quarters later. For a CEO, it is a direct report absorbing dysfunction that eventually surfaces as attrition, missed integration milestones, or a quiet stall in the number.
The leader you chose steps into a system that has been in motion long before they arrived. Relationships carry memory. Informal power has its own logic. The trust, where it exists, was built by someone else.
Their instinct is to prove the placement was right. To move fast. To hold everything together while getting oriented. That instinct reorganizes the system in the wrong direction, and the cost does not appear until month twelve or eighteen, when the force runs out.
Good executives absorb that friction quietly. They hold it together, and holding it together looks like success right up until the moment it does not. This practice exists to make it visible early, while it is still cheap to change.
Two Doors
One seat, eighteen months, and a tenure that gets decided in the first ninety days.
For a board, a CEO placing a critical direct report, a CHRO, or a sponsor protecting a single appointment. Your leader stops absorbing the dysfunction and starts building a system that carries it, and you see the proof at ninety days.
The deal is signed. Now make them one company.
For an operating partner or an acquirer holding two or more organizations that arrived with different goals, different cultures, and different unwritten rules. Every group ends up moving behind the same thing, and the productivity, efficiency, and cohesion you underwrote in the model start showing up in the business.
What Changes For You
01
The newly seated executive stops absorbing the dysfunction and starts building a system that carries the weight. The organization keeps performing when the leader steps out of the room.
02
Board expectations, executive intent, and operating reality stop drifting apart. Decisions move faster because the conditions for them were built first.
03
The costliest eighteen months of any leadership change stop being a coin toss. Institutional knowledge, key relationships, and momentum are preserved instead of quietly bled out.
04
The leader ends the engagement with an installed practice, not a binder. What gets built keeps running after the engagement ends.
05
Sponsors, boards, and investors get visibility into what is actually happening in the transition, and evidence that the leader they backed is compounding, not coasting.
06
The organization gets a structure that outlasts any one leader.
Why this holds up
Thirty-five years across cultures, industries, and rooms where the stated problem was not the real one. A body of work behind it, Stop Holding It Together: A Strategic Roadmap for Recently Promoted Executives, with a foreword by Jack Canfield, releasing January 2027.
There is a repeatable system underneath this, tested in the field rather than assembled in a classroom. You will see it working. You will not have to learn it.
Where this ends
There is a name for it. Mutual Prosperity®, the point where the organization’s success and the success of the people inside it finally move in the same direction, so the people who contribute the most are no longer the ones who sacrifice the most. The people who hold an organization together are rarely the ones it thanks. This changes that, with recognition, a real voice, and fair reward for the people who were never founders but carry the work anyway.
The difference between an organization at a B minus and the same organization at an A plus is not incremental, and it does not cost more to produce. Same people, same payroll, same building. You already own every input. Alignment is what makes them multiply instead of cancel.
Proof of Practice
Stop Holding It Together, a strategic roadmap for recently promoted executives, with a foreword by Jack Canfield. Releasing January 2027.
It is the clearest way to understand how John thinks before bringing him into your organization, and the book to hand the executive you just placed.
Who We Work With
Private equity operating partners protecting thesis inside the hold period, especially at the point of a CEO or C-suite transition.
Boards and nominating committees accountable for the success of a newly seated CEO, president, or C-suite hire.
CEOs placing a critical direct report into a role that carries strategic weight and cannot afford an eighteen-month wobble.
CHROs and Chief People Officers responsible for executive transition outcomes across a portfolio, division, or enterprise.
If the value of a transition is riding on your desk, this is the practice built for it.
About John
Thirty-five years spent building what most organizations say they want and rarely know how to build: systems that hold without anyone holding them. Sixteen of those years lived outside the United States, across Asia and the Gulf.
After thirty-five years of watching capable people carry organizations on their own back, he wrote down what it costs and what to build instead.
Work With The Institute
The first six to eighteen months in a senior role are not optional. If a leader you sponsored, backed, or promoted is stepping into that window, the time to protect the outcome is before the pattern sets, not after.
