Europe's second-line leadership gap is the continent's quiet competitiveness problem
Large groups have world-class chief executives and thin layers immediately beneath them.
Across industrials, banking and pharmaceuticals, the constraint European groups describe privately is rarely the top job. It is the twenty people who should be ready for it.
Decades of hierarchical progression produced excellent functional specialists and comparatively few general managers with genuine profit-and-loss scar tissue. The result is a promotion market that clears externally, expensively, and slowly.
The remedies being tried — smaller autonomous business units, earlier country-manager rotations, real budget authority pushed two levels down — are structural rather than programmatic. Leadership academies are not the answer; consequential jobs are.