Pulling off a CEO transition is never easy. DuPont’s smooth baton passing early this year underscores the importance of having a solid plan. This is not an easy time to nurture a new generation of corporate leaders. Training budgets are being slashed while a depressed housing market has made it harder to move around for better job opportunities. And yet the need for top talent is growing. A record 1,484 U.S.-based chief executives left their jobs in 2008, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Many more could step down this year as losses mount and executive angst runs high. “The CEO job today is more stressful and draining than at any time in history,” says Tom Stemberg, the founder and former CEO of Staples. “People have just run out of gas.” At a time when corporations worldwide are crying out for new thinking, for a sense of how to plan for the next CEO, look at the seamless CEO transition at DuPont. CEO Charles Holliday had spotted top lieutenant Ellen J. Kullman as a potential successor more than a decade ago. Holliday, a gregarious Tennessean and DuPont lifer who became CEO in early 1998, had mentored Kullman since they met in the early 1990s in Tokyo. He was running the AsiaPacifi coperations, and she was visiting as a senior manager in the electronic imaging unit. He was impressed with Kullman’s willingness to learn. “There goes a future leader,” Holliday recalls saying to himself. Kullman remembers being peppered with questions. “He scared me,” she says. Kullman joined DuPont as a marketing manager in 1988 and was quickly promoted, distinguishing herself by improving troubled units. She was tapped in 1995 to run DuPont’s $2 billion titanium technologies business and later turned a newly formed safety-products division into what became the company’s highest-earning segment during the time she ran it. “We had to change our business model three times before we found the right one,” Kullman recalls. “There were times when I questioned whether we could get there or not.” Kullman was executive vice president when Holliday told her in September 2008 that she would soon replace him in running DuPont. Although her appointment came a bit sooner than Wall Street analysts expected, no one was surprised to see her taking over as CEO at the start of 2009.

Questions

1. What kind of managerial skills did Holliday sense that Kullman possessed to make him want to appoint her as his successor? 

2. What kind of manager do you think that Kullman will be in the future? 

3. What skills do you believe you possess that will make you a successful manager?z