Companies mistakenly bundle management with authority, forcing top performers onto a management track to gain influence. Separate them. Define management's role as coordination and context-sharing, allowing senior individual contributors to drive decisions without managing people.

When new leadership arrives, a long-serving executive's value lies in their deep institutional knowledge and cross-functional relationships. They can act as a crucial bridge, helping synthesize diverse perspectives to guide the new team's vision and ensure a smoother transition.

When an executive leaves, the CEO should step in to run their department directly. This provides invaluable operational context for hiring a replacement and empowers the CEO to make necessary but difficult changes (org structure, personnel) that a new hire would hesitate to implement.

It's exceptionally rare for a company to make fundamental changes once its founders are gone. They become "frozen in time," like 1950s Havana. This institutional inertia explains why established industries, like legacy auto manufacturers, were unable to effectively respond to a founder-led disruptor like Elon Musk's Tesla.

As companies scale, the "delivery" mindset (efficiency, spreadsheets) naturally pushes out the "discovery" mindset (creativity, poetry). A CEO's crucial role is to act as "discoverer-in-chief," protecting the innovation function from being suffocated by operational demands, which prevents the company from becoming obsolete.

Unlike startups, institutions like CPPIB that must endure for 75+ years need to be the "exact opposite of a founder culture." The focus is on institutionalizing processes so the organization operates independently of any single individual, ensuring stability and succession over many generations of leadership.

Unlike a functional manager who can develop junior talent, a CEO lacks the domain expertise to coach their entire executive team (e.g., CFO, VP of HR). A CEO's time is better spent hiring world-class leaders who provide 'managerial leverage' by bringing new ideas and driving their function forward, rather than trying to fix people in roles they've never done.

Unlike a line manager who can train direct reports in a specific function, a CEO hires experts for roles they themselves cannot perform (e.g., CFO). A CEO's time spent trying to 'develop' an underperforming executive is a misallocation of their unique responsibilities, which are setting direction and making top-level decisions.