Sharing insights from a CEO hiring specialist. This article focuses on CEO Hiring Trends 2024
Only ~30% of the Incoming CEOs Were From Different IndustryAs mentioned in the last post on CEO Hiring Trends, India Inc prefers to hire an experienced CEO when they hire externally. But, how open are they to people coming from different industry?
In our analysis, we have classified moves as 'within sector' even if the move is from one consumer sector (e.g., paints) to another, but harder-core sector (e.g., FMCG)? If, on the other hand, the move is from a FMCG to an auto component, we classify it as 'across sector'.
Even with this broader classification, only about 30% of the CEO moves were 'across sectors' and the remaining 70% were 'within sectors'.
We think this will change and will have to change, as the demand-supply mismatch, along with other constraints such as compensation, ability to offer wealth creation vs vanilla compensation plans, location constraints, perceived/real governance standards, cultural fit and chemistry etc start coming into the picture.
If we look at the CEOs of US Fortune 500 or their European counterparts, it is not uncommon to find CEOs who have moved fluidly across industries and sectors.
As another analogy, 5 years ago, it was not common to find ex-management consultants in CEO roles – but today, with successful examples, we have quite a few across sectors (Anish/Mahindra, Vivek Gambhir/Boat, Mohit/Godrej Properties, Shveta Arya/Cummins, Nilesh/JSW Cements, Jagdish/Sobha). A few successful cross-sector CEOs will open the gates to more such moves.
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