THE EXECUTIVE SEARCH TEN
This year’s question paper.
Twelve questions, put identically to all ten chairs, answered on camera. Beneath each one, the questions it opens. Every question becomes an episode, and the twelve close the year as the Almanac.
Published July 2026 · Answers film from September 2026
01
What separates the executives who succeed from the ones who fail?
Between them the ten have appointed several thousand senior people and watched what happened next. Almost nobody else has that view.
What do the ones who work out have in common?
What is the most common reason someone does not?
Is any of it visible before they are hired?
02
AI is doing more of the work every year. What happens to the people you place?
Not what the industry says on stage: what ten owners are actually seeing, and what it means for who ends up on a shortlist.
Where does it already do the work better than a person?
Can a company in this industry stay out of it?
What does it mean for the quality of who a client ends up hiring?
03
What is the most overrated quality in a leader?
Every job specification asks for the same handful of things. Ten answers on which of them are worth anything.
Which quality gets someone appointed and then does not help them?
What is underrated instead?
What do you weigh differently now to five years ago?
04
Is culture fit a real assessment, or an excuse?
The most used phrase in hiring, and the least examined. Ten answers on whether it means anything.
What does it actually describe, when it is used well?
When is it cover for something else?
How would you assess it if you had to?
05
What kind of leader does a business need now that it did not five years ago?
The brief has changed even where the job title has not. Ten answers on what companies are actually asking for.
What has appeared in briefs that was never there before?
What has quietly dropped off?
Is it a real shift, or a fashion?
06
What do boards get wrong about succession?
The appointment every board knows is coming, and most leave too late. Ten answers on what goes wrong.
When should the work actually start?
Why is the internal candidate so often mishandled?
What does a board do when the answer is nobody inside?
07
Is the market for senior people rational?
Packages, scarcity, and the premium on a name. Ten answers on whether any of it makes sense.
What is a senior appointment actually priced on?
Where is the market paying for the wrong thing?
Has any of that changed in the last five years?
08
When should a company not use a search firm?
The honest map of where search earns its fee, and where it does not.
Which searches never needed a firm?
When have you turned work away, and why?
What does the industry sell that it should not?
09
Twenty years of diversity targets. What has actually changed at board level?
The industry that fills the boardroom answers for the boardroom.
What has moved, and what has not?
Where does the pipeline actually break?
What has your own company changed, specifically?
10
How much of a leader’s success is the person, and how much the company they land in?
The oldest argument in leadership, put to ten people who have watched it settle itself several hundred times.
Give us a split. Sixty forty? Ninety ten?
Have you seen the same person succeed in one place and fail in another?
What should that change about how a company hires?
11
Who did you back when everyone else thought you were wrong?
The appointment nobody else believed in. Ten stories, and what happened next.
What did you see that the room did not?
How hard did you have to push?
What happened?
12
The question they each wanted to be asked.
The year closes with ten different questions. Each chair chooses the one they have been waiting for.
What is the question you never get asked?
Why does it matter?
What is your answer?
Then it is published as a book, and the questions begin again.
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