As a technology enthusiast who had built several computers and spent considerable time on the then-nascent Internet, it was clear to me that Levin had little understanding of how AOL’s products actually worked. I found myself wondering how a business executive with such limited technical knowledge could find himself running one of the largest media and technology companies in the world. Yet as I learned soon enough, Levin was not an outlier. Activist investor Carl Icahn has a theory that much of corporate America mismanages the succession process in choosing new CEOs. He calls it
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