"If I am so incompetent, look at the size of my incompetence"

"If I am so incompetent, look at the size of my incompetence."

The owner of the distributor said this pointing at two hundred thousand tires in stock. It was the polite way of telling you to shut up.

Later I heard the same sentence in other companies. The owner of a poultry business told people to go sell his fifty useless farms.

Years later I saw how those stories ended. The poultry owner set up the entire succession and took part in none of its stages. Another hired an outside Board member, said they should sort it out, that he would stay in his chair, and left for Europe.

Neither of them refused to do succession. Both paid for it. Both left the room.

It is the reading I make at every table since then: when wealth becomes the answer to any question, the owner stops being evaluated inside his own company. And whoever is not evaluated does not transfer command.

Outsourcing succession is the most expensive way of not deciding it. Corporate Governance on paper does not become real authority: the successor receives a title without a mandate and the team keeps consulting the founder. Then it is not succession, it is probate, and the cost shows up in the controlling stake.

The inventory that proves yesterday's competence is the same one that blocks today's decision.

If the owner is not in the room, someone decides for him. The bank, the buyer or the probate.

If you cannot remember the last time you changed your mind inside your own company, the date of your succession already exists. You just were not the one who set it.