When the CEO Becomes Board Chair

Harvard Business Review (Oct 27, 2025) by David Gau and Carter Cast examines the increasingly common CEO-to-board-chair transition. Citing a 2023 Spencer Stuart study, the authors note that more than 40% of outgoing S&P 500 CEOs assumed board chair roles within a year of stepping down, and lay out the governance hazards that follow — including blurred lines between strategy oversight and operational direction-setting and a chilled successor relationship. For SEA mid-market family-business boards where the outgoing CEO routinely becomes chair, the article supplies a vocabulary for naming the transition risk explicitly.