Preparing to Sell and Preparing to Hand Over Are Rival Investments: A Persistence Column for the Six-Tier Ontology

An owner preparing to leave a firm faces two futures usually treated as one: sale, or handover to a successor. This paper derives why the preparation each rewards differs. A six-tier ontology of organizational transferability already states what arrives in a buyer’s possession, but that column is indexed to a counterparty, which a succession lacks. Decomposing it into three mechanisms of persistence — legal, artifact, and person — yields a second column indexed instead to two independent facts: whether the going concern is conveyed, and whether the incoming principal must acquire what a person carries. Crossed, a sale to an acquirer supplying its own principal disturbs legal and prices artifact continuity, a succession disturbs only person continuity, and a fourth case inherits both. Among the tiers a succession disturbs, one is drawn at operating frequency rather than at discretion, so its loss cannot be deferred. In an owner-operated firm the holder of that residual is the only one who could document it and the only one who could teach it, making the two preparations rivals for one budget. The paper states the crossover this predicts, supplies a pre-registered design with its power, and reports an audit finding neither construct measured. Includes zharnikov-2026bm-persistence-column-succession.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) — a machine-readable specification of the paper’s claims, assumptions, and dependencies. The paper’s full machine-first bundle (the SPINE claim/dependency graph and the ONTOLOGY term module) lives in the public repository; see github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard. This PDF is generated programmatically from that machine-first source under a research-as-repository model.