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This article explores the influence of education and experience on the time to the top in family and non-family CEOs who work for Latin American family firms.

In order to achieve these objectives, this study draws upon human capital theory as well as career and family firm literature. The careers of 129 CEOs of family firms who form part of the América Economía ranking were analyzed and quantitative methods were used.

In Latin American family firms, family CEOs reach the top faster than their non-family counterparts. In addition, the influence of human capital variables on the way to the top differs between the two groups. For family CEOs, obtaining a graduate degree delays the way to the top, while for non-family ones, it reduces the time to the top. As regards experience, for promoted family CEOs, the greater the percentage of the career spent in the organization they lead, the shorter the time to the top. No support was found for either the influence of having worked for just one firm or having had elite graduate education abroad, in multilatina CEOs.

Individual career management suggestions for future CEOs as well as specific guidelines for talent managers are proposed

This is the first study to explore the influence of human capital indicators on the time to the top in Latin American family firm CEOs.

Este artículo explora la influencia de la educación y la experiencia sobre el “time to the top” de los Gerentes Generales, miembros de la familia y no miembros, quienes trabajan para empresas familiares latinoamericanas.

Para lograr estos objetivos, este estudio se basa en la teoría de capital humano y la literatura sobre carreras y empresas familiares. Fueron analizadas las carreras de 129 Gerentes Generales de empresas familiares, integrantes del ranking América Economía, y se utilizaron métodos cuantitativos.

En las empresas familiares latinoamericanas, los Gerentes Generales miembros de la familia llegan más rápido a la cima que los no miembros, y la influencia de las variables de capital humano en el “time to the top” difiere entre ambos grupos. Para los Gerentes Generales familiares, los estudios de posgrado retrasan el “time to the top”, mientras que, para los no familiares, lo reducen. En cuanto a la experiencia, para los Gerentes Generales que han sido promovidos, cuanto mayor es el porcentaje de carrera invertido en la organización, menor es el “time to the top”. No se obtuvo respaldo para las hipótesis sobre la influencia de trabajar en única firma o el posgrado de élite en el extranjero, en este último caso para los Gerentes Generales de multilatinas.

Se ofrecen sugerencias de gestión de carrera a nivel individual para futuros ejecutivos, así como lineamientos para los gerentes de talento.

Este es el primer estudio que explora la influencia de los indicadores de capital humano sobre el “time to the top” de Gerentes Generales de empresas familiares latinoamericanas.

This study investigates the influence of experience – organisational tenure, international experience and springboard role – upon Chief Executive Officers’ (CEOs) time to the top and the time taken by CEOs to reach that position. As work and careers are embedded in economic and institutional environments, although prior Western career studies have explored this relationship, this study aims to determine the suitability of experience as a human capital attribute to explain CEO career success in Latin American firms.

169 Latin American firms were considered (America Economia, 2014). Biographical data about CEOs were manually collected and systematically crosschecked, and multiple hierarchical regressions were employed.

Organisational tenure and lifetime experience were found to reduce the time to the top. International experience delays the time to the top. International assignments closer to HQ do not exert an influence on time to the top. In multilatinas, promoted CEOs who have held Corporate springboard roles get faster to the top than those having held Divisional positions. Findings offer partial support to the human capital theory experience in Latin America, stressing the relevance of cultural, socio-economic and institutional factors.

The identification of career success predictors may enhance the career decision-making processes of individuals and organisations.

This study contributes to human capital and career literature, being the first one to explore the relationship between experience and time to the top in CEOs working for Latin American firms.

The importance of top management commitment for the success of major change initiatives has been emphasized in the literature, while the role of boards of directors (the board) has been in less focus. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the boards affect the sustainability of major organizational change.

This paper is based on three case studies of the diffusion of total quality management (TQM), Toyota production system (TPS), and lean production (LP). Findings from these case studies are then compared to literature on management and organization and corporate governance.

A TQM/TPS/LP transformation is a long‐term process. In the case studies, top management commitment is crucial for the sustainability of the implemented change programs. However, a committed top management does not “last forever.” The issue of sustaining change therefore falls back on the governance structure. If the board does not understand the essence of an organizational change, the risk is that top management is replaced with new leaders, who are given new directions by the board. Issues identified as important in order to create board commitment for sustainability of major organizational change are: board competence and experience, board meeting dynamics, board as a provider of critical resources, and the process of replacement of chief executive officers. The dominating agency theory within corporate governance also needs to be questioned and complemented by more recent theories such as the stewardship and the resource‐dependence theories.

This paper provides insights into the board's role in sustaining major organizational change.

This paper employs human resources (HR) analytics to investigate the pathways through which high-potential managers ascend to C-suite positions, and how different developmental paths influence turnover among executives.

By combining job analysis and competency assessment with sequence analysis, the authors utilize HR analytics to analyze the work experiences of 53 general managers spanning 57 years (n = 2,742), encompassing various roles, job requirements, and 20 executive competencies attached to over 1,000 positions.

This study's findings reveal three distinct developmental paths that lead to the C-suite, characterized by differences in the content, context, timing, and complexity of work experience. Furthermore, the authors identify that a more complex developmental path tends to reinforce executives' competency in self-awareness while inhibiting their development of technical competency, ultimately resulting in reduced executive turnover.

By employing HR analytics to analyze empirical data embedded in job and organizational contexts, this study sheds light on the critical role of timing and complexity of work experiences in executive development. It also offers practical implications for firms seeking to optimize their leadership pipeline and reduce executive turnover by leveraging HR analytics effectively.

There is an increasing realisation that managerial and professional staff play a crucial role in determining the success of the organisations which employ them, whether in the private or the public sector. Hence there is a growing concern with the quality and development of such staff. A detailed study of these important occupational groups, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC reference F/00/23/00 98) was recently conducted by the authors. Although focused on Britain, the research is linked with parallel studies being undertaken in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and several other European countries. The broader international study will be published within the next year as Roomkin, M. (Ed.), The Changing Character of Managerial Employment: A Comparative View Oxford, University Press, New York and Oxford. The demographic and educational trends which relate to managerial and professional employees, their careers and other aspects of the management of such human resources are discussed. The remuneration of managerial and professional staff, their unionisation and their role in the wider society are then considered.

Management literature describes the “revolution” in business performance measurement which encourages the use of “soft” employee‐related measures, such as employee satisfaction, morale and commitment. Cultural issues have been identified as common stumbling blocks to progress in organizational change programmes, such as total quality management; hence, the use of measures in monitoring or inducing cultural change has great potential. Describes the results of a postal survey of the Times Top 500 companies carried out in early 1995, designed to probe issues such as the degree of use of these measures and associated benefits. The results, derived from 45 companies, reveal a significant gap between management theory and practice in this area. Few companies report innovative use of “soft” measures in the determination of business strategy, i.e. the “balanced scorecard” approach, which is attributed to the lack of evidence of “hard” (financial) benefits from companies successfully involved in this practice.

The authors have analyzed IBM surveys on evolving C-suite technology priorities over several years to find fresh opportunities for Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to work closely together.

This new study of evolving technology priorities is based on conversations with thousands of private and public sector C-suite executives participating in a series of IBM surveys over the past decade.

The authors found that the major technology challenges facing corporations are how to manage openness across the organization, individualize customer relationships and invest in the partnership ecosystem for innovation.

This is a meta analysis based on a series of reports on IBM interviews with top executives starting in 2004.

To achieve significant innovation, outperforming organizations are pursuing external partnerships. Increasingly partners are non-traditional – communities of interest, academic institutions or other types of organizations.

The authors identify three key challenges for CEOs, CMOs and CIOs and show how they can align their technology plans and resources to address them.

To explain that, unlike with Sarbanes‐Oxley, relatively low‐cost technologies and procedures are becoming widely accepted for helping institutional money managers and hedge funds to comply with reforms to increase the transparency, documentation, and justification of “soft dollars”. Soft dollars are commissions that money managers pay to brokerage firms above and beyond actual trading execution costs.

The article examines two such technologies by surveying different offerings and reviewing in detail market‐leading systems. The first technology examined is trade‐idea communication and management systems, which capture and analyze quantitative information about equity‐trade ideas. The second technology is broker review systems, which capture and analyze qualitative information on proprietary brokerage and research services. Both trade ideas and proprietary brokerage services are paid for through soft dollars and generate approximately 50 percent of an estimated $18 billion in annual brokerage commissions for Wall Street.

There are three primary reasons why these technologies and procedures cost much less than those used to enforce Sarbanes‐Oxley. Technologically, they have features that keep costs low, encourage use, facilitate customization and leverage existing data. Operationally, they automate practices already in place, capturing lost value and generating important management information. From a regulatory point of view, they do not require the documentation and testing of controls in advance, as Sarbanes‐Oxley does – procedures that can only be defensively accomplished by outside auditors and attorneys. Instead, money managers are being asked to capture and evaluate management information, which, in turn, they are using to increase productivity.

Rather than avoiding soft dollars for fear of the regulatory overhead, or developing complicated and expensive legalistic procedures, institutional money managers and hedge funds are using relatively low cost technology to enforce “soft dollar” compliance. At the same time, they are generating valuable management information that is helping them to become more productive.

This article contends that the content and scope of “second generation” state reforms in Latin America show a high degree of heterogeneity due to the national contexts and the depth of the changes produced by the earlier reforms. The “third generation” reform is rejected as a valid category. There is no clear distinction between premises or values, roles, and instruments of reform. The “first generation” of reforms constituted the easy phase of state transformation. In the second phase, the difficulties are similar to the ones that Latin American countries faced during 70 years of reformist attempts which constituted the prehistory of this process and ended mostly in failure. By means of a critical analysis of the paradigm of the “reinvention of governmentr”, the instrumental challenges implicit in its eventual materialization are reviewed. As an emblematic case, the Argentine experience is used to illustrate the main propositions of this article.