Last week, Intel Corp CEO Pat Gelsinger and Stellantis NV CEO Carlos Tavares unexpectedly announced their departures after mounting pressure from investors and failed turnaround plans. Gelsinger and Tavares are joining the more than 1,800 American CEOs who have left their positions this year, data compiled by global outplacement and career transition firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc showed.
As boards of directors in the corporate US have become more independent and are increasingly holding CEOs accountable for underperformance in earnings and share prices, the number of CEO departures this year has hit the highest level since Challenger started tracking CEO changes in 2002 and is up 19 percent from the more than 1,500 departures during the same period last year, the firm’s data showed.
That high turnover rate also reflects a decline in the average tenure of US CEOs as a result of not just rising performance pressures, but also the ever-increasing complexity of the business environment — from tech transformation to sustainability, geopolitics and social issues — regardless of the industry. In other words, it implies investors’ strong desire for leaders who can navigate challenges decisively, quickly and effectively, in addition to prioritizing short-term gains.
Whether through voluntary resignations or involuntary dismissals, the increase in CEO changes has become a global phenomenon, subject to various factors such as performance, retirement, scandals and personal reasons. Nonetheless, successfully navigating such transitions in today’s fast-paced business world is crucial for outgoing executives and the firms they leave.
The second volume of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) founder Morris Chang’s (張忠謀) autobiography, which covers his career from 1964 to 2018 and was published late last month, revealed how Chang began planning who would succeed him in 2005. In 2013, Chang stepped down as TSMC CEO for the second time, handing over the leadership to Mark Liu (劉德音) and C.C. Wei (魏哲家). In 2018, Chang retired from TSMC, with Liu becoming chairman and Wei assuming the CEO role.
Despite Chang’s retirement, TSMC’s performance remains strong and the company has expanded to the US, Japan and Germany. However, TSMC’s succession planning highlights how most Taiwanese firms have yet to be serious about their strategies in developing action plans for passing leadership roles to important people within their organizations.
Not having a feasible succession plan could have devastating consequences for firms’ management stability, corporate reputation and talent retention, which is especially obvious in Taiwan, where most family business leaders expect next-generation family members, rather than professional managers, to take over the business. Even so, about 46 percent of family businesses believe that cultivating a succession team to identify and develop future leaders is the most urgent challenge, a Taiwan Institute of Directors survey released on Nov. 12 showed.
A survey by Robert Walters Taiwan released on Nov. 29 found that about 87 percent of companies face challenges in succession planning, with 54 percent saying that their organizations do not have a succession plan and 43 percent believing their existing strategy could be more effective. Moreover, the professional recruitment agency links two important factors to Taiwanese businesses’ implementation of effective succession planning: a sufficient supply of senior talent, and a balance between organizational needs and traditional cultural limitations.
While succession planning is essential, firms in peacetime must also be ready for unexpected CEO departures. Efforts such as establishing contingency plans, developing crisis management protocols and finding experienced interim leaders can help mitigate risks and navigate transitions smoothly.
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
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