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Speaking of 7-year itches, yesterday marked seven years to the day that I set up Coracle Consulting. Frankly, I’m delighted, if not a tad shocked, to still be afloat as a small business. It’s been a great ride so far. Since recovering from my Achilles accident in April I’ve started again to ramp up the networking side of what I do. All of which has given me plenty of grist for the blogging mill.
Last Tuesday, I spent a day at a German Business Association investment event here in Ho Chi Minh City, juggling business cards and too many coffees with a delegation from Hamburg and a slew of business leaders based in Vietnam. Next week I’m off to Hanoi for more chamber events and more of the same, only with better phở.
My old CEO at Business in the Community, Julia Cleverdon, used to drum into us the importance of being out “on the Rialto”, as the Venetian merchants would have put it: in the marketplace, finding out what’s new.
Even in our digital world, with its endless posting, face-to-face time can’t (yet) be replaced. The panels can run long, but the five minutes between them, when a CEO, an investor or an HR director tells you what’s actually keeping them up at night, can be worth the ticket price.
And lately, one word keeps coming up. Not AI and not tariffs (although both are always lurking). But speed.
Everything is moving faster: investment decisions, market entries, restructures, product cycles. Some of that is genuinely thrilling. But the more I listen, the more I wonder about the people expected to steer it all, because the time we give leaders to prove themselves seems to be shrinking, too.
It isn’t just business. In July, Andy Burnham walked into Number 10 as Britain’s seventh prime minister in ten years, after Keir Starmer was pushed out by his own party. When I left London for Asia in 2011, a prime minister was something you could reasonably expect to grow bored of. These days you barely have time to learn their surname before the removal vans arrive.
Then there’s football. Over the 2025/26 Premier League season, nine managers were sacked, after an average of under eleven months in the job – the shortest the League Managers Association has on record. Ange Postecoglou lasted 39 days at Nottingham Forest.
And in business, the numbers tell a similar story. Russell Reynolds Associates counted 234 CEO departures across the major global indices in 2025, a record for the second year running. Average tenure for outgoing CEOs fell to 7.1 years, down from 8.3 in 2021, and the number leaving within their very first year equalled the previous record.
What strikes me most isn’t the turnover itself. It’s what has happened to the first bit of the job. A new leader’s first couple of years used to be for listening, clarifying the mandate, building a team and getting people pointing in roughly the same direction. Results came later. That runway has been chopped right back.
Simon Sinek has a good phrase for where this leads. In The Infinite Game, he argues that leaders fixated on short-term wins create a tunnel vision that pushes everyone to focus on “the urgent at the expense of the important”. When the person at the top is under that kind of pressure, it cascades down to everyone else.
It isn’t all chaos, mind. Roughly a third of last year’s CEO exits were planned, board-led decisions. I think this could also suggest boards are hiring leaders to oversee a chapter, rather than an era. In a world moving this quickly, there’s a logic to that. But are we preparing people for it?
When the runway is short and nobody inside is ready, boards also look outside. External hires nearly doubled as a share of incoming S&P 500 CEOs in 2025, the highest rate in eight years, and only around one in five organisations has a formal CEO succession plan at all.
In other words, a lot of companies aren’t building their next leaders. They’re buying them. And often in a hurry and at a premium.
If a leader only has a year or two to make a mark, then arguably what makes or breaks them is the ability to land quickly: building trust with people they’ve only just met, setting a clear direction, reading a room full of different cultures and agendas, and bringing people with them rather than dragging them along.
We still call these “soft skills”, which is a faintly absurd notion, given there’s nothing soft about walking into a new team, in a new country, under a looming deadline, and getting them to believe in you.
This is especially true in Vietnam. Growth keeps creating senior roles faster than organisations can grow people into them. The talent is plainly here. What’s often missing is structured development before the promotion, rather than a scramble after it.
All of this comes into sharp focus at home, because my daughter leaves school next year, and I look at the world she’s stepping into with a mix of excitement and mild parental panic.
So what do I tell her? A few things feel true.
First, her career probably won’t be a ladder at all, more a series of chapters, some chosen and some thrust upon her. She’ll need to be comfortable starting over more than once.
Second, the skills that travel between those chapters are the human ones. AI is getting very good at routine tasks. It is not currently very good at building trust, handling a difficult conversation, persuading a sceptical room, or noticing that a colleague is quietly struggling.
Third, and this is the optimistic bit, my daughter’s generation may be better prepared than mine was. In August I sat on the judging panel of a youth hackathon in Saigon, watching teams of 16-to-24-year-olds, most with no background in the subject, build credible business ideas in 24 hours flat. Speed didn’t faze them. Ambiguity didn’t faze them. What they needed, and asked for, was help presenting, persuading and working together under pressure.
That’s the bit we can teach.
At Coracle Consulting, this is what we spend our days on: helping new managers, senior leaders and the next generation build the communication, presence and judgement that let them land quickly.
If you’re at the EuroCham or German Business Association events in Hanoi next week, do come and say hello. Otherwise, drop me a line at timbishop@coracleconsulting.net.
Have a great weekend!
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