Job one.

• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE - Editorial

PUBLISHER Bob Rock provides sound advice on CEO succession on page 4, and I'll weigh in with a brief comment too. How could we not address this matter? We're both penning our pieces following a two-week span of "stop the presses" succession stories playing out at AIG (Hank Greenberg's sudden stepping down as CEO), Boeing (Harry Stonecipher's shocking ouster as CEO), and Disney (Robert Iger's official designation, after a torturous process, as Michael Eisner's successor).

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When I became editor of DIRECTORS & BOARDS in 1981, an executive who shall remain nameless--simply because after a quarter of a century I can't remember who it was!--said to me, "Jim, the job of a director is to make sure the right guy is running the company."

My reaction was: That can't be right. Surely there is a whole lot more to being a director and doing what a director does. Well, the subsequent years in the governance trenches have tempered my initial recoiling at that fellow's board philosophy. I've come to the realization that maybe he was right.

And here's why: If you get this big job done--i.e., making sure that the right person (as my board expert would have had to say it today) is in the top spot--then everything else is likely to fall right in line. Not that you don't have continuing concerns and a whole raft of ongoing duties and accountabilities. But when you've done the hard work of getting into the corner office a CEO in whose character and capability you have utter confidence, then you've done job one.

Walter Wriston put this to me in another way when I interviewed him in 1986, two years after he had...