The “Perfect Successor” Is a Myth: What Family Businesses Should Look for Instead

Research suggests that education, experience, confidence, personality, and motivation can all shape family business succession.But none offers a shortcut to finding the ideal next leader.Succession planning often begins with a deceptively simple question: Who should lead the family business next?Families may look at who has the strongest résumé, the most experience in the company, the right education, the greatest enthusiasm for taking over, or just simply who is the primogenitary heir.Advisors may encourage them to establish formal requirements for successors, map out a timeline, and identify the family member who appears most prepared.Those things matter.But they can also reinforce one of the most persistent misconceptions about succession: that somewhere in the family is a "perfect successor" waiting to be identified.Research does not support that assumption.Our review of 85 studies (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00472778.2025.2527664)examining individual differences in family business succession found that successors differ across a wide range of characteristics, including education, experience, competence, self-confidence, personality, motivation, emotional attachment, gender, and willingness to take over the firm.Yet there was no single characteristic, nor established combination of characteristics, that reliably identifies who will become a successful successor.