A new chief executive inherits an organization that has been described to them rather than observed by them. The first year is spent finding out which of the inherited assumptions still hold, usually one surprise at a time.

The exposure is in the structure that was carried by the previous leader’s judgement rather than by process. It worked, and it left no record of why. It becomes visible at precisely the moment there is no longer anyone in the building who can explain it.

Diligence reads a target’s numbers thoroughly and its structure lightly. What is hard after close is rarely the model. It is the assumption that two companies which were governed differently will operate as one because an agreement says they are.

Both sides carry the same question, from opposite ends. A seller is asked to evidence how the business is actually run. A buyer needs to know what it is integrating before it owns it.

Fast growth conceals its own cost. Headcount, revenue and complexity rise together, but accountability does not scale by itself, and for a period the results are good enough that no one asks whether it has.

The constraint tends to appear as a series of unrelated problems: decisions slowing down, the same escalations reaching the same few people, work being redone. They are usually one structural finding wearing several disguises.

A second geography does not add one market. It adds another regulatory regime, another set of local practices, and a distance between where decisions are made and where their consequences land.

Boards discover this late, because the early reporting looks familiar. What changes is oversight: the same governance obligations now have to be met through people the board has never met, under rules it does not know as well as its own.

Public markets do not begin by asking whether a company performs. They ask whether it can demonstrate how its decisions are made, who is accountable for them, and what its board actually does.

Companies preparing to list often find the work is not building new controls but documenting the ones they have been running informally, and discovering which of them were never really controls at all.

Under pressure, decisions concentrate. A small group starts making them quickly because someone has to, and that is often the right response to the emergency.

It is also temporary, and it is rarely treated that way. Turnarounds fail twice: the first time on the numbers, the second time when the concentration that stabilised the company never unwinds and becomes the way the company is run.