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Effective leadership succession cannot succeed within 6 to 12 months

Tony Yoseloff · Tony Yoseloff – Forty Years of Davidson Kempner (Capital Allocators, EP.313) · May 8, 2023 · at 50:48

Tony Yoseloff, Managing Partner and CIO of Davidson Kempner, explains how multi-year succession planning enabled seamless leadership transitions at the firm.

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“You can't just say, hey, I want to retire, let's get this set up for six to 12 months, like, and expect it to succeed. This is something we worked on in different guises for a decade, and I think there was grooming well before that in terms of my taking over the firm, and so by the time we announced it publicly, which would have been in April in 2019, I think for most of our client base and people internally, it largely happened already, so it wasn't a surprise really to anyone in that regard, and that's very important. I think the structure of our organization helps as well, but fundamentally, it's a process over a very long period of time”

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