When You Inherit the Business, You Also Inherit a Governance System You Didn't Build.

When an external COO, interim CEO, or operating executive steps into a company, they inherit the strategy, expectations, relationships, and problems—but not the history that created them.

That makes governance ambiguity more than a board-management issue; under an urgent mandate, it can quickly become an execution issue. In this article, I look at why decision rights, founder involvement, board expectations, and communication thresholds need to be made explicit early—and why waiting for a crisis to discover how the governance actually works is already too late.