Do we honestly think executives even care about their leader pipelines?

Here’s a funny story that probably won’t be that funny to you: back in summer 2013, when I worked at McKesson on a business school internship, I got to sit in a couple of “leadership pipeline” meetings. These were meetings for the top dogs, essentially, to look at who they have in the pipeline that maybe could become “a strategic leader” or some such down the road. McKesson makes billions of dollars every year, so you’d assume this was a formalized, specific, research-driven process, right? No. It was a clusterf*ck on wheels headed towards an oil refinery with a book of matches. And because the meeting was about a fluffy topic like “leaders of tomorrow” and not about financial deliverables, no one really wanted to be there.

You hear all the time about studies where companies are “concerned” about their leadership pipeline. Eventually, new people become leaders — brought in from outside, a lot of the time — and the company keeps making money. So maybe it’s not really that big of an issue. But it seems like more people should honestly care, right? Hell, at least it does to me.

Final thing about that McKesson gig and those meetings before we get into this: at the meetings, you’d always hear the same 2–3 names; they were typically the lieutenants of the current leadership. There’s an awkward political…