Firms that document every role and keep the notes current gain resilience. Nobody, up to and including the chief, should be irreplaceable.
Warren Buffett told Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders in May 2025 that he would hand over as chief executive at the year’s end, and on January 1, 2026, Greg Abel duly took the chair. Abel had run the conglomerate’s non-insurance businesses since 2018 and had been the designated successor since 2021. Bob Miles, who has taught a course on Berkshire at the University of Nebraska-Omaha for years, reckoned the handover changed Abel’s title more than his day-to-day role. He was well prepared, and well briefed. For some time the Berkshire Hathaway board had been ensuring that he would be just that.
The Berkshire Hathaway experience, alas, is not, by and large, the norm. Andy Challenger of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, found 446 chief executive departures at listed American companies in 2025, the most since the firm began keeping count way back in 2002. Across all American employers the number was in excess of 2,000, and many of those exits resembled the exact opposite of the Berkshire Hathaway handover, the clearest sign of which being the almighty scramble to find even temporary replacements.
In January 2025, Stephanie Neal, who runs DDI’s Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research, noted that only one in five heads of human-resources had a successor in mind for the most critical posts, and that only around half of key jobs could be filled from within a firm. Patti Williams, a vice dean at Wharton, a business school, found in a survey that 86 per cent of leaders called succession planning critical while at the same time as many as 70 per cent viewed long-term planning for it pointless. Deloitte, in its own survey of 300 family-run firms in February 2026, found 85 per cent agreed that succession mattered, but that only 57 per cent had a plan.
Writing it down
Employees at GitLab, a software company with more than 2,000 staff and no head office, write down almost everything they do. Its handbook, open to anyone, runs to over 2,000 printed pages with every team responsible for keeping its own section up to date (and given a reminder when they do not). Those records, kept current, mean that a new arrival can quickly get on with the job they were hired to do. It was Sid Sijbrandij, who co-founded the firm, that started the habit and then, he has said, asked everyone else to do likewise. When he stepped aside in December 2024 to deal with his cancer, Bill Staples took over as chief executive through what the board called routine succession work.
Ensuring that succession is as smooth as possible should not be confined to executives. Arguably, it is just as important (perhaps even more so) further down the food chain, although instructions to keep seat notes are often met with reluctance. Staff can think that their time is being policed, or that they are in effect writing their own exit notes. Why (not without reason) they might ask, should I make it easier for somebody to replace me?
This is where careful management is needed. Seat notes should never be designed to make replacing somebody easier, but to ensure that the respective job is preserved. A member of staff who needs to take a long period of sick leave will not want to return to a mess. Decent seat notes will ensure that their (temporary) replacement does a good job. They ensure continuity, not change, and continuity is something that clients will increasingly want to know is a given, not an afterthought. If two of your top people are laid low for an extended period of time, how do I know the project will continue without interruption?, a client might ask (and would be well within their rights to do so). Any firm in possession of good seat notes will be able to answer that question without any problem at all. Those in which work is done on a more casual, ad hoc basis will struggle. The client will likely go elsewhere.
Which brings us back to Buffett, who spent a great deal of his career making sure that his own exit would be seamless (reassuring his investors in the meantime). Good seat notes are a more humble version of the same thing, applied to every seat in a firm. New hires should be expected to ask where the kitchen or toilet is, but not, How do I do this?
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