Boards keep saying they want lower risk CEO appointments.

Then they hire the more expensive, higher failure rate option because the candidate has shinier logos and the search firm brought a nicer lunch.

External CEOs fail more often than internal hires. 30% vs 24%.

They cost more. Roughly 15% more.

They last less. 7.3 years vs 8.7.

And yet in 2025, external CEO appointments in the S&P 500 hit 33%, the highest level in eight years.

This is the bit where everyone in the boardroom pretends to be data driven, then immediately ignores all the data because someone from a bigger company has entered the chat.

Private equity does this constantly.

A portfolio company has three internal candidates who know the business, the customers, the politics, the pricing model, the systems, the skeletons and the one sales leader who is somehow still employed.

But no. We need a “world class operator”.

So we pay a search firm a fortune to find someone from a larger company, who arrives with a 100 day plan, four McKinsey slides, and the quiet confidence of a man who has never had to fix HubSpot himself.

The incentives are beautifully broken.

Search firms get paid for external searches.

Internal succession pays them nothing.

So the market nudges boards toward the theatrical option, not always the better one.

Sometimes the best CEO candidate is already in the building.

Which is deeply inconvenient, because nobody gets a 60 page candidate pack, a psychometric report, or a celebratory dinner at The Grill for noticing the obvious.