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— Insights

Serious leadership decisions
deserve serious thinking.

We write about what we see in the field — the leadership challenges, cultural dynamics, and organizational decisions that determine whether companies perform or plateau. These are not think pieces. They are observations from 30 years of advising boards, CEOs, and leadership teams through the situations that matter most.

Filter by: All Total Performance Leadership™ Executive Search Leadership & Culture CEO & Board From the Partners
NACD
Directorship
National Association of
Corporate Directors
— As Published In NACD Directorship

Why Execution Risk Fails to Show Up in Board Materials

Boards seldom face surprises in strategy, but execution often stuns them. Traditional reporting emphasizes steadiness over strain — and capable executives pride themselves on solving problems, not escalating them. In this article published by the National Association of Corporate Directors, Rob Andrews explains how boards can surface execution risk before it becomes a crisis.

Rob Andrews · Chairman & CEO · NACD Directorship Magazine
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— Recent articles

HR Executive
Published Article
As Published In · HR Executive Magazine
Why Leadership Assessments Are Failing HR Leaders
Standard assessment tools measure personality and self-perception — not how leaders actually perform under pressure. This article explains the gap and what a more predictive approach demands.
Rob Andrews · HR Executive Magazine
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Executive Search
The First Question We Ask Before Every Search — And Why Most Firms Never Ask It
Before we source a single candidate, we ask: what does success look like in this role, in this culture, eighteen months from now? The answer changes everything about how a search is run.
Rob Andrews · February 2025
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CEO & Board
What Boards Get Wrong About CEO Succession — And the Cost of Getting It Wrong
CEO succession is the most consequential decision a board makes. Most boards treat it as an event. The ones that get it right treat it as a continuous process — and they start years before they need to.
Rob Andrews · January 2025
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From the Partners
Why the CHRO Role Has Become the Most Undervalued Seat in the C-Suite
The organizations that will outperform in the next decade are the ones that figured out, early, that human capital strategy is business strategy. The CHRO who can make that argument and deliver on it is worth more than most boards have yet priced in.
[Partner Name] · December 2024
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Leadership & Culture
The Onboarding Year: Why Executive Placements Succeed or Fail in the First Twelve Months
The search ends at placement. The risk doesn't. The first year is when cultural misalignment surfaces, expectations collide, and the organization decides whether it has the right leader or the wrong one. Here is what the research — and 30 years of practice — says about how to get it right.
Rob Andrews · November 2024
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From the Partners
Private Equity and the Leadership Gap: What PE-Backed Companies Consistently Underestimate
PE sponsors are rigorous about financial due diligence and often cursory about leadership assessment. The companies that underperform relative to thesis are almost never let down by the financials. They are let down by the leadership team that was supposed to execute against them.
[Partner Name] · October 2024
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— Ongoing series
Total Performance Leadership™
A bi-weekly series by Rob Andrews

Every two weeks, Rob Andrews writes about the principles behind Total Performance Leadership™ — the framework he has spent 30 years developing for building organizations that consistently outperform. These are not trend pieces. They are hard-earned convictions about what makes leadership actually work.

Read the Series →

— From the partners

Perspectives from across the firm.

Allen Austin's partners bring decades of experience across executive search, leadership advisory, and organizational consulting. Starting now, each partner contributes a regular perspective on the leadership challenges they see most often in their practice areas.

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Rob Andrews
Chairman & CEO
Writes on Total Performance Leadership™, executive search philosophy, CEO succession, and organizational culture. Bi-weekly.
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Edie Bartlett
Senior Partner
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LT
Liz Townsend
Senior Partner
[Practice focus and writing topic placeholder — to be completed with Liz's input on what she'll write about.]
GS
Gary Skarke
Partner
[Practice focus and writing topic placeholder — to be completed with Gary's input on what he'll write about.]
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— Stay current

Leadership thinking worth reading.
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— From thinking to action

If something you've read here speaks to a challenge you're facing, we'd like to hear about it.

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