Welcome to your weekly board briefing — we hope you’ve had a restful August and are ready for the autumn push.

Kate is in the hot seat this week and, inspired by Apple’s Tim Cook, we ask how boards manage outgoing CEOs in transition moments.

Elsewhere, top stories include doubling pay for directors of UK plcs, climate volatility and supply chains, and BP’s new chair.

If you want to catch up on recent briefings, you can explore the FT Infosys Board Network hub, where you’ll find links to the FT.com articles, research that we’ve referenced and our archive of briefings.

Do you have comments or suggestions for the newsletter? Send them to Andrew Hill at andrew.hill@ft.com or Kate Hodge at kate.hodge@ft.com 

Thanks for reading.

On Tuesday this week, Tim Cook assumed the role of executive chair at Apple — taking with him $47mn in salary and stock.

The role was created for the tech giant’s now former chief executive. The company had previously nodded to what Cook’s role would include, saying he would “assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world”.

The executive chair job and hefty pay packet have confirmed to analysts that Cook will “continue to act more like an executive than an arm’s-length board member”, the FT reports. But could this spell trouble?

One area fraught with difficulty for boards in a succession moment is carving out a future role for the outgoing boss — retaining their knowledge and experience, while maintaining appropriate distance for the new CEO to make it their own.

In the US, making the outgoing boss a chair is a well-trodden path. But Kate Lye, founder and chief executive of leadership adviser The Savoir Group, is cautious about it: “The qualifications that make someone a great CEO, do not make them a chair — in fact the opposite is true,” she argues. 

There are other models. Some boards are keeping the outgoing boss as a paid adviser — on hand for the new successor, but importantly, only at their request. Mark Freebairn, partner and head of the board, chair and non-executive director practice at search firm Odgers, notes this was recently done at a FTSE company that kept the former chief on retainer for a year.

Lye notes a similar set up at an American-Japanese company which kept the outgoing boss on call as a mentor and adviser and “created an innovative remuneration package for the former CEO which is dependent on the new CEO being a success”.

The perfect transition is akin to Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool football club, says Freebairn. At his farewell speech, Klopp led a chant for his successor Arne Slot “and then vanished, but he was on the end of the phone if Arne wanted to speak to him”.

The worst transition, he compares, is that of Alex Ferguson to David Moyes at Manchester United. Ferguson handed over the baton but sat on Moyes’s shoulder.

Cook will know what it is like to fill big shoes — as executive chair, he will need to be as deft with his shadow as he has been with supply chains.

At its most recent share sale, Revolut was valued at $115bn — bigger than every UK bank except HSBC, writes the FT’s banking and fintech reporter Laith Al-Khalaf.

It’s not stopping there, either, with aims to “expand its nascent credit business into a full-service bank and disrupt the industry much as Ryanair has transformed aviation.”

There are challenges ahead — including earning enough trust for some consumers to deposit large amounts — but insiders and investors are feeling bullish.

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My top FT picks

BP gets the chair it wants rather than the one it needed Governance: What Ian Tyler can do is shore up the rest of the board, seeking directors with traits and competences he lacks The best, worst and strangest ways AI is really being used at work Technology: Consultants, lawyers, bankers and others share a snapshot of how tech tools are changing their jobs One fix for UK plc’s underperformance: equity for all Remuneration: A new proposal suggests doubling the pay of board directors using stock options How climate volatility shakes up companies’ earnings too ESG: Supply chains are vulnerable to heatwaves and cyclones

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1. CEO survey snapshot | PwC Billed as a “mid-year temperature check”, this research polled 351 of the chief executives who responded to the firm’s most recent annual global survey to see how their outlook has changed. Confidence is up. Of the CEOs surveyed in both pieces of research, the proportion who report being very or extremely confident about revenue growth over the next year rose from 39 per cent to 42 per cent.

2. 2026 proxy season global trends part 4: Shareholder proposals, activism and sustainability | Glass Lewis There is plenty to unpick in this feature including that in the US, while the number of shareholder proposals that went to a vote dropped this year, “the number of governance-related proposals increased considerably”. This included 71 resolutions “requesting an independent chair or the separation of the CEO and chair positions”.

3. 2026 US compensation postseason review | ISS-Corporate Salaries in the S&P 500 continued their march upwards, with median CEO pay reaching $17.5mn for the 2025 fiscal year, according to this research. Indeed, since 2021, median CEO pay in the index has risen by 20 per cent — compared with a 5 per cent increase in the remaining Russell 3000. Interestingly, say-on-pay support “climbed to five-year highs” across both indices too.