| Welcome to your weekly curated briefing on what should matter to board directors. Andrew is away this week, so I am flying solo, taking a look at the great CEO reshuffle of recent years, succession planning and whether Disney’s lengthy process for appointing a new boss this week offers any lessons for others making top level hires. Our chart of the week shows how chatbots are transforming retail. There will also be our usual round up of notable FT articles and new research. If you want to catch up on recent briefings, do explore the FT Infosys Board Network hub, where you’ll find links to the FT.com articles and research that we’ve referenced in recent weeks and to our archive of recent briefings. Do you have comments or suggestions for the newsletter? Send them to me at jonathan.moules@ft.com or Andrew Hill at andrew.hill@ft.com. Thanks for reading. 
© FT montage/Bloomberg/Getty Images Disney has produced a media empire based on films with fairy tale endings. Will the same be true of its latest succession plan? It was announced on Tuesday that the keys to the magic kingdom will pass from current CEO Bob Iger to the well regarded theme parks chief Josh D’Amaro. But the decision was neither simple nor swift, taking three years and involving interviews with 100 external candidates. The media giant had every right to be careful given previous experience. In 2020 Disney appointed Bob Chapek to take over from Iger, but his rocky tenure ended in less than three years and resulted in Iger returning to the role. To avoid a repeat performance this time, Disney established a succession committee led by its chair James Gorman, the former head of Morgan Stanley known for his rigorous succession planning at the investment bank. D’Amaro faces a tough task. Disney’s shares have declined 42 per cent over the past five years, weighed down by fears over Big Tech’s incursion into Hollywood. The latest example of this is Netflix agreeing to buy Warner Bros Discovery’s film and TV studios for $82.7bn. Other CEOs will no doubt empathise. The disruption to business models from the digital era, and AI in particular, has ramped up since the pandemic. So has the number of companies replacing their bosses with CEO exits running at record levels over the last couple of years, despite a slight drop at the end of 2025, according to outplacement specialist Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The future is uncertain, but Disney could at least show whether a thorough succession planning process is a better way to ensure that a CEO remains in post to deliver necessary change. Walmart hit a $1tn valuation this week, an achievement usually reserved for tech firms. America’s largest retailer has achieved this status in part by embracing technology, enabling to gain ground on Amazon, the company that did more than any other to drive ecommerce adoption but has been more defensive than Walmart when it comes to AI. 
 | Castel Group’s chief in limbo amid bitter feud with controlling family | | The secretive wine and beer empire’s key holding company has challenged the Castel family’s move to oust the chief executive and chair, claiming resolutions at a shareholder meeting had not been ‘validly’ passed. |
|  | Kevin Warsh’s nomination as Fed chair to spark rethink of bank’s role | | Donald Trump’s choice for US central bank governor is poised to lead an overhaul of the institution from its helm, subject to the Senate approving his appointment. |
|  | Veteran EY partner appointed to lead US audit regulator | | Jim Logothetis oversaw the Big Four accountancy firm’s relationships with major clients, including Coca-Cola and Fiat Chrysler, according to his LinkedIn profile. |
|  | Norway’s $2tn wealth fund stress tests effects of climate shocks and AI correction | | The equity portfolio finds it could lose a quarter of its value as a result of extreme weather and shed more than half from an AI boom collapse. |
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The Weight of America’s Boards | James Drury Partners This study of 654 US company boards and 6,264 board director positions provides a range of governance-relevant information, including board size, trends in CEO board service, patterns in director diversity and each board’s governance capacity. Corporate Intent | National Bureau of Economic Research Do investors care about why a firm behaves responsibly, over and above what the firm does and how much cash it earns? This working paper finds an “intention premium” with investors willing to pay more for shares in a company that embraces social actions if it is motivated by a social concern rather than profit maximisation. Selected Issues for Boards of Directors in 2026 | Cleary Gottlieb Drawing on insights from colleagues in the law firm’s various international offices, this report examines the critical issues that dominated boardroom discussions in 2025 and identifies the emerging trends that will shape board agendas in the year ahead.
Board Network is written by Andrew Hill and Jonathan Moules | 
