Succession: a relay, not a horse race

A "relay" means the successor is identified in advance, works alongside the incumbent for a period, and takes over with an overlap. A "horse race" means several candidates compete for the post, and the ones who lose often leave, taking what they knew with them. In the corporate setting, relay succession is associated with better post-succession performance and with a better chance of retaining strong people who did not get the job.

Now the attribution, and here our own marketing copy has been too bold. The "Kamer succession model" referred to in gslk material is not a peer-reviewed model, and no such named model exists in the literature. The source is Rebecca Ann Kamer's 2018 UNDERGRADUATE honours thesis, which applies corporate succession literature to student organisations on the basis of interviews with five presidents. It is a useful, honest applied write-up — but it is neither a new theory nor a strong empirical base, and it should be called what it is.

So the accurate statement is this: the relay/horse-race distinction rests on CEO-succession research (Vancil, 1987; Zhang & Rajagopalan, 2004), and the student-organisation application is discussed by Kamer (2018). gslk's own four handover stages are our design, informed by the relay idea — no author above published them, and we do not present them as though someone did.

It is worth adding what the literature says about the limits: too much overlap can undermine the incoming leader's authority, and in practice the two models are not mutually exclusive — organisations that run a relay have often run some kind of selection process earlier.