Day: August 17, 2024

A horse race is a contest of speed between horses, typically ridden by jockeys or pulled by sulkies. It is the oldest of all sports and has evolved from a primitive contest of speed or stamina between two horses to a spectacle that often involves large fields of runners and sophisticated electronic monitoring equipment, but its basic concept remains the same: The first one across the finish line wins. A board that chooses to use a horse race to choose its next CEO should first consider whether the company culture and organizational structure are compatible with such a process. It also should decide if the executive who emerges at the end of the race will be appropriate for the company at that point in time.

The horse race in which a company selects its next CEO can have a long-term effect on the organization. It can dissuade strong leaders deeper in the organization from aligning themselves with an unsuccessful candidate and can also demoralize the successful candidate by making him or her seem like a hero who owes his or her success to outside forces. In addition, the process can be expensive if the company is forced to pay outside consultants to conduct a detailed review of candidates or to recruit externally.

An overt horse race can also undermine a board’s trust in management, which may damage the effectiveness of the board and the company as a whole. It can derail the succession planning process, leading to a delay in naming a new leader and resulting in an unnecessarily lengthy leadership period. Depending on how the competition and the final decision are handled, it can also have a negative impact on the organization’s ability to fill other senior-level positions within the company.

When the term horse race is used in a political sense, it usually refers to a close contest. With mudslinging, name calling and attack ads vying for attention, the issues at stake in a campaign can get lost amid the horse-race drama. A growing body of research suggests that when journalists focus primarily on who’s in the lead or who’s behind — what researchers call horse race coverage — voters, candidates and the news media itself suffer.

At the 2009 Breeders’ Cup, Santa Anita managers flooded the track with veterinarians and high-tech imaging equipment to monitor the health of the “equine athletes.” Many of the animals were suffering from an illness called exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage, or bleeders, which is caused by exertion in hot weather and is not always detectable until it is too late. Trainers and owners pumped some of the horses with cocktails of legal and illegal drugs to mask injuries and enhance their performance. Some even encouraged their stars to run while they were wounded, as Big Brown did in 2008. The effort proved futile and he died during the Belmont Stakes.