CEO Succession Practices: 2012 Edition

This report documents succession events of CEOs of S&P 500 companies. In addition to updates on historical trends, the report features discussions of the most notable cases of CEO succession in 2011 (based on press announcements and other publicly available information) as well as the results of a survey of corporate secretaries and general counsel on the succession oversight practices of their boards. Among this year’s findings: 19.2 percent of successions involved an outsider CEO appointment, which is consistent with the continuing trend of hiring outsiders that has been recorded since the 1970s.