Corporate boards often say that succession planning is their top priority, but at publicly traded companies, directors rarely get to turn that planning into action: The average CEO tenure at S&P 500 firms is nearly 10 years. That’s in sharp contrast to the private equity world. PE firms hold investments in dozens of companies, and after making an investment, they nearly always replace the CEO. As a result, although a typical public company director might help hire a CEO a few times in a career, veteran PE executives hire multiple CEOs each year and many dozens over the course of a career, giving them a far greater ability to observe trends and learn from successes and mistakes.