I've seen a couple of CEO replacements, who were brought in for various reasons. You'd expect a B-school like Stanford to stress "planning" since that's their s

I've seen a couple of CEO replacements, who were brought in for various reasons. You'd expect a B-school like Stanford to stress "planning" since that's their solution to everything. For the new CEOs I've seen, "they've been there before" seems to receive WAY more weight than it ought to. Often they're people who just keep failing up. You can take the Civil War as a useful analogy. Neither Grant nor Sherman had really "been there before" the war, and their resumes were decidedly unimpressive. Somehow the test of actually doing it won out over their lack of formal qualifications.