If you have been in the chair for less than six months, the most important briefing you will ever need is the one nobody is able to give you.
You arrive with a mandate, a strategy deck and a handover pack. Within weeks you are making decisions on top of assumptions you didn’t make, with a team you didn’t choose, against promises you didn’t give.
The board wants momentum. The market is watching. And the one question that would explain most of what you are about to find, why your predecessor left, has no honest answer on file.
That isn’t a failure of goodwill. It’s structural. I call it the Briefing Gap.
Why the board can’t brief you honestly
When a predecessor leaves under pressure, the people briefing you are the people who appointed them, backed them, and then decided to let them go. Each of those decisions carries legal, reputational and personal weight.
So the account you receive is shaped. Settlement terms limit what can be said. The chair has a version that protects the board’s judgement. Each executive has a version that protects their own standing.
None of them is lying. But the sum of their accounts is not the truth. The announcement said “stepping down to pursue other opportunities”. You were hired because that wasn’t quite it.
What’s missing tells you more than what’s there
In a handover, the useful signal is rarely in the findings. It’s in the absences. Here are five worth looking for.
- The number that appears in every board pack but never in the strategy.
- The decision “deferred to the new CEO”. Ask when it was first deferred.
- The executive who is keen to brief you first, and the one who hasn’t asked for a meeting.
- The advisers stood down in your predecessor’s final months, and who made that call.
- The commitments made to lenders, investors or the largest customer that nobody has put in front of you in writing.
None of these proves anything on its own. Together they outline the map you weren’t given.
The window is shorter than you think
Anything you find in the first 90 days can still be named as inherited. After that, it becomes yours.
By day seven, you can see where the story and the evidence part company. By day 30, you can test the three or four assumptions carrying the most weight, before you have publicly endorsed them.
By day 90, the board has formed its view of what you inherited, and so of what you should be judged on. If you haven’t framed it, someone else has.
Most incoming CEOs rightly spend those 90 days listening. The risk is listening only to the people with the most reason to shape what you hear.
What to do about it
You can’t make the board brief you honestly. You can get an independent read of what you have actually inherited, from someone with no stake in the previous regime and no interest in protecting it.
This isn’t a 100-day plan template or a leadership coaching programme. It’s a short, senior diagnosis of the gap between what you were told and what is true, done before the window closes.
I have spent decades on both sides of that table, as a Director at AlixPartners and a Managing Consultant at A.T. Kearney, including several engagements with incoming CEOs. I’m happy to put you in direct touch with some of them.
What I have learned is simple. You weren’t set up to fail. You were handed a map, and the roads leading you off a cliff weren’t on it.
If you think I have this wrong, and your board briefed you fully and candidly, I would genuinely like to hear it. Write to me at ceo@johncorr.com.