When your company needs a new leader, ‘Insider or Outsider?’ is the wrong question

In the fall of 2024, two iconic American brands hit the wall in roughly the same quarter, and their boards reached in opposite directions. Nike turned inward, bringing back Elliott Hill, who had spent more than three decades inside the company before retiring. Starbucks went the other way and poached Brian Niccol from Chipotle, picking a leader who had never sold a single latte. Same crisis, opposite bets. It was part of a record wave: U.S. public companies announced more CEO changes in 2024 than in any year since outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas began tracking. Boeing, Intel, Nike, Starbucks—one marquee name after another faced the same critical decision. The choice almost always gets framed as a choice between an insider and an outsider. I will suggest an alternative axis. Instead, the right choice depends on who can best define and hold the company’s strategic center. Failing to address this coherently is a major source of disappointing successions. When sustainable competitive advantage is no longer, you need a center Every company organizes itself around a center: a primary source of value that everything else is arranged to serve. It might be a mission, a customer, a technology, an ecosystem, or the relentless erasure of friction. Strategy, in the end, is the discipline of choosing that center and keeping the whole organization coherent around it. Companies rarely need rescuing because they suddenly got bad at what they do. They need rescuing for one of two reasons. The first is when an old expression of the center has stopped paying off. That could be because a once-durable advantage went transient, and the old business model no longer delivers. The second occurs when the center is still sound, but the company has drifted away from it. Call these a broken center and a lost center. They look similar from the outside. They demand completely different leaders. So the real job description for the next CEO is some version of re-centering: confirming