As 2009 comes to a close, Bud Baker, the former Chairman of Wachovia speaks about how CEOs should prepare for succession….

Imagine, if you can, a corporate chief who takes the top four company managers and invites them to do each others jobs. Is the risk of this too breathtaking? Is the payoff meaningful? Would any Board question the chief’s sanity?

It is difficult to think of a major corporation today lacking a strong Governance Committee and management succession plan. Less sure is that Chief Executives themselves take seriously the opportunity to influence and lead the succession process. At the heart of the matter, is the constant need for an unvarnished assessment of available talent and timely exposure of leadership candidates to critical experience.

In truth, brave CEO’s must offer the best candidates to the Board and give aspirant’s fresh leadership experience. This may be inconvenient. It may mean taking a time-tested technology chief and putting him or her into sales. It could mean redefining jobs to make them more relevant in a radically changing world. In this turbulent world, we don’t need a marketing officer, we need someone who discerns and interprets customer desires. We don’t need an economist, we need a visionary to evaluate business lines and take the company out of things we shouldn’t be doing. Perhaps we should take our best sales person and send him or her to critical, but often neglected, Shareholder Relations.

Should we move people to allow them to absorb provocative new experiences – even if the timing is inconvenient? Does anyone on our team have a fresh and practical view of strategic thinking? Are we willing to take risk to bolster high performance aspirations?

At the end of the day, it is easy to criticize leaders for failing to recognize the need for change. At the end of the day, too few of us have been brave enough to do so.