Podcast
Executive Moves by Topliner.
Where the world’s executives come from – and where they go next. One real move per episode, worked backwards the way you would work a mandate.
Episodes
Latest episodes.
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Nike executed the plan perfectly. The plan was wrong.
In 2019 Nike hired a technology CEO to accelerate a digital transformation, and handed product, design and marketing to somebody else. Five years later it brought back Elliott Hill, who had joined as an intern in 1988 – and two years on, the stock sits at a twelve-year low. A companion to the Apple episode: the man who chaired Nike’s succession committee was Tim Cook.
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Tim Cook, John Ternus, and the bench nobody was watching
Tim Cook handed Apple to John Ternus on 1 September 2026. The handover was textbook; what was happening underneath it was not. In the nine months around the board’s vote, Apple lost its COO, its AI chief, its general counsel and its head of interface design – most of them to the companies Apple is losing to.
The format
One move, worked backwards.
No guests and no news round-up. Each episode reads one executive move the way a search firm reads a market – and the reading is done with the same engine our partners run their searches on.
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One real move
A CEO succession, a role that keeps burning through people, or a company’s whole hiring pattern.
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Worked backwards
The way you would work a mandate: who was really in the pool, what the mandate demanded, what happened to everyone who was not chosen.
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From the public record
Filings, proxy statements, departure lists, org charts and published research. Every fact was already public; it simply was not anyone’s job to put it together.
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Researched with our engine
Each episode is assembled with the same platform our partners point at their own markets.