Newsletters

September 2011

Will it Still Rain After Your Rainmaker Leaves?

There’s no getting around the fact that when a rainmaker leaves a company, it’s harder to bring the rain. At least, for a while.

But it doesn’t have to be a parched existence without your prized superstar who retires or leaves unexpectedly. Witness Apple’s recent CEO transition. The succession from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook was carefully crafted and planned so that when it became critical to implement, it was far less painful than it could otherwise have been.

And at many companies, retiring baby boomers will soon begin to drain the executive ranks – they can’t stay forever, regardless of how challenging the personal economics of their retirement might be.

If you’re at a smaller company, succession planning is a similarly important challenge. Here’s a link to a recent article in Construction Equipment Distribution magazine that outlines the “8 Must-Haves of Successful Succession Planning” for small businesses.

Does your company have a clearly defined succession plan for key positions?

"The BizFighter course by PriSim surpassed all expectations of my classmates and me, and drew the entire class into being active participants. The course gave us insight into the short term and long term customer focused and performance driven decisions that have to be made by the highest levels of an organization in order to stay in business.

We learned the inter-relationship between investing in Six Sigma, CMMI projects, and technology and people, and how those investments relate to the bottom line. Because of BizFighter, it became clear to me that my company's investment in this course can be linked to an overall strategic plan to grow employees' core competencies and that in turn will help position the company for more wins on follow-on and future contracts."

- Program Manager, Large A&D Company, October 2009