Founder and CEO Succession
Henning Piezunka, Associate Professor of Management, Wharton School
April 11, 2025
Getting founder- & CEO-Successions right is crucial. You know this from a relay race: You can run as fast as you want, but if you fail to pass the baton to the next runner, you and your company fail. Mastering the CEO succession is challenging: the current CEO needs to resign, a successor needs to be found, the company must be ready for the succession, the successor needs to be onboarded, and so on. Expectations are high, and the danger of disappointment is looming large. As part of this presentation he will illustrate how companies go about CEO-succession – and identify practices that result in a successful succession.
Henning’s teaching is focused on startups and entrepreneurship, with a particular emphasis on guiding entrepreneurs in building, scaling and growing their business ideas and ventures. He teaches this material to MBA students, executives and corporations, and coaches start-up CEOs and entrepreneurial leaders. He has received outstanding teaching ratings, been on the Dean’s list for excellence in MBA teaching, and won the INSEAD best teacher award multiple times.
Henning is an award-winning researcher. He studies how organisations can tap into the knowledge of their members to foster greater inclusion, innovation and diversity. He has also conducted research into the crowdsourcing of ideas and the wisdom of the crowds. In another stream of research, Henning studies collaboration and competition, such as the factors that escalate competition into dangerous conflict. He has further researched succession in family firms and how people can improve their ability to interact with others by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Through his research, Henning has also developed significant expertise across various domains, including start-ups, technology companies, family businesses and a range of sports. He has leveraged data from sports such as Formula One, soccer and chess to shed light on effective management practices. Henning’s work and expert opinions have been featured in leading business media including Time Magazine, The Economist and Harvard Business Review.
Henning obtained a PhD at Stanford University, a Master of Science at the London School of Economics, UK, and a Diploma Kaufmann from the University of Mannheim, Germany. Before starting his academic career, he co-founded a web design company in 1998 and acted as its founder-CEO until selling it in January 2016. By 2016, Henning’s company employed more than 30 people and served customers in more than 80 countries.