Q: What companies would you hold up as examples of succession planning done right? --Robert Handfield, Raleigh, North Carolina

A: It’s sad to say, but your question would be a heck of a lot easier to answer if you had asked for examples of succession planning done wrong. That trend is gaining such ground these days it’s alarming.

For instance, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch recently lost their CEOs, and it quickly became obvious that neither company had a successor in the wings. What people didn’t know was how such a thing could possibly happen.

Not to avoid your question; certainly many examples of outstanding succession planning exist, like Johnson & Johnson, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Caterpillar. Indeed, research shows that well over 50 percent of companies typically promote their CEOs from within. Such companies obviously understand one of the most fundamental tenets of business: a well-crafted succession plan vastly minimizes disruption when any CEO leaves, expectedly or not.

At the extreme, imagine what it felt like inside Citigroup and Merrill Lynch in the weeks after their CEOs departed. People all over the company were asking themselves, “What will happen to me in this mess?” and “What will the devil-we-don’t-know be like?” So long, productivity!

In-house succession has the added virtue of being cheaper, as an outside hire almost always requires enough money to fill an armored car.

But if good succession planning makes so much sense, why isn’t it more common?

Well, sometimes a board must go outside to shake things up. IBM turned to Lou Gerstner, then at Nabisco, for instance, when it wanted to transform its culture in 1993. More recently, the German company Siemens hired Peter Loescher from Merck to separate itself from long-standing practices that had damaged its image. In still other cases, a company can have a controlling shareholder who wants to do succession his way. Viacom’s Sumner Redstone and Fidelity’s Ned Johnson come to mind.

But when a change effort or a controlling shareholder are not the case, and succession planning still doesn’t happen, the fault can only lie with the board. Sure, boards have other big responsibilities, like grappling with the CEO over growth opportunities and strategy. But we’d suggest two other reasons why succession planning can fall off a board’s agenda.

The first we’ve written about before: so-called shareholder activists have lately pressured boards into a bunker mentality, in which they obsess over the minutia of financial reports. We say so-called because no real shareholders would ever want their boards to fixate on rounding errors rather than growth and succession.

Obviously, we’re not saying that boards should ignore financials, but no board member, flying in once a month to pour over reams of data, is ever going to uncover a scheme. That’s why the board’s job when it comes to financial oversight is to make sure management has the control systems and high-integrity people in place that will.

The second reason is more emotional, in that the topic can be, well, so awkward.

After all, succession planning requires boards to talk candidly about what qualities are missing in the current CEO and the timing of his or her departure, and it compels the current CEO to chime in on these matters without seeming defensive. The whole thing is sort of like a married couple trying to have a conversation about who the perfect “replacement spouse” would be. Pretty squirm-worthy stuff.

Now, we’ve heard it said that boards don’t have good succession plans because senior management ranks are so thin in today’s “perform or die” cultures. We’d spin that argument to say that if senior management ranks are thin, it is because so few companies are thinking about succession and thus asking their people to take on cross-functional assignments. They allow them to rise to the top of their silos and then retire.

This dynamic is particularly prevalent in financial institutions, where there is virtually no crossover among trading and retail and investment banking because of “expertise demands” and compensation differentials. The one notable exception is JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who basically acted as Sandy Weill’s junior partner for 16 years, building expansive business experience and knowledge along the way.

Alas, Jamie Dimon cannot run everything! Nor can financial company boards keep scrambling to find someone like him when their CEO walks away. Succession planning has got to be deliberate. It has to be a discipline. And if boards don’t impose that on themselves, perhaps authentic shareholder activists will soon.

*****

Jack and Suzy Welch are the authors of the international bestseller Winning (Collins). Their latest book is Winning: The Answers: Confronting 74 of the Toughest Questions in Business Today (Collins). They are eager to hear about your career dilemmas and challenges at work and look forward to answering your questions in future columns. You can e-mail them questions at winning@nytimes.com. Please include your name, occupation, city and country.

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A: It’s sad to say, but your question would be a heck of a lot easier to answer if you had asked for examples of succession planning done wrong. That trend is gaining such ground these days it’s alarming.

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