Drive from Buitenplaats Beeckestijn in Velsen-Zuid towards the locks and within a quarter of an hour you pass the setting of one of the largest industrial transformations in the Netherlands. A steelworks that must decarbonise. A port area that has become a base for offshore wind. A quay being prepared for installation work that runs well into the 2030s. The plans are drawn, the sums are counted and the megawatts are known.
What is discussed considerably less is who will lead all of this over the next twenty years. That question became a good deal less theoretical over the summer.
The delay is not technical
Bloomberg reported on 12 August that N. Chandrasekaran will step down as chairman of Tata Sons when his term ends in February 2027. That departure followed months of deadlock over his reappointment. In early September the Dutch trade union FNV wrote that talks on the future of steelmaking in IJmuiden are progressing slowly and that the unrest at the top in India is a factor.
I leave the public side of that file where it belongs: outside this article. What does concern me as an adviser is the mechanism underneath it. An investment decision of this size requires a signature at board level and a signature requires someone with both a mandate and a horizon. If either is missing, the file stalls: however well prepared it may be technically.
Nor is it an isolated case. In the same period, the permit procedure for the IJmuiden Ver Gamma-A wind site moved from late September to December, at the request of developers who needed more time for internal approvals. And the Energiehaven IJmond remains in its design phase: because of steel slag in the Averijhaven, the consortium is working out a sand variant, after which the parties will jointly decide on next steps, according to the Province of North Holland. Three files, the same limiting factor three times over. Decision-making that sits elsewhere.
What it costs when succession starts too late
Last year I worked on the succession of a managing director at a manufacturing company on the Maasvlakte. The departure was foreseeable, the reason known and the business technically in excellent order. Even so, the conversation about succession only reached the table at the point where the decision should already have been taken. Internally it had been considered too late and we were brought in too late to run a proper search.
What followed was not a bad appointment. It was an expensive one. Months of uncertainty in the organisation, an interim arrangement that lasted longer than anyone had intended and a new director who began his first hundred days carrying a deficit he had not created. The pattern is almost always the same: succession is treated as an event when it is a process.
The profile this region needs
The challenges in the IJmond call for a type of executive who is scarce. Not because technical knowledge is lacking and not because experienced managers are in short supply. The bottleneck lies in the combination.
A programme of this size requires someone able to understand and challenge a technically complex trajectory, down to the level where suppliers and engineers must defend their assumptions. That same person must serve an environment in which local residents, regulators, trade unions, shareholders and several layers of government all hold a legitimate voice and where a misstep in communication costs months. Candidates strong on one of those two axes, I find. The combination is considerably rarer.
Project horizons outlast board terms
A second feature sets these challenges apart from ordinary transformations: the time horizon. A quay structure is not written off in four years and neither is a new production line. The decisions being taken now reach well beyond the tenure of the people taking them. Continuity of leadership in programmes like these is not a luxury but a precondition.
Yet in practice succession reaches the agenda only once someone actually leaves. The search is then reactive by definition. The situation at Tata Sons shows how far the consequences can travel: an unresolved chairmanship succession on the other side of the world touches an investment programme on the North Sea Canal.
The layer below carries at least as much weight
The conversation about leadership in the IJmond also tends to focus solely on the top. The real vulnerability sits one layer down: with the programme managers, the plant managers, the heads of maintenance and engineering. That is where knowledge of the installation resides and where continuity is actually secured.
That layer is regionally rooted in a way the top is not. A director will relocate if needed. A plant manager with a family in IJmuiden or Beverwijk rarely will. The figures underline how narrow that pool is: in the first quarter of 2026 there were close to 1,200 technical vacancies open in South Kennemerland and the IJmond against roughly 350 available jobseekers on benefits and the region counts more than 240 occupations with good prospects (UWV). Nationally the labour market has cooled to 95 vacancies per 100 unemployed in the second quarter, yet 87 of the 93 occupational groups remain tight or very tight. Cooling is not the same as room to manoeuvre.
In my own portfolio this shows up in lead times. Assignments in engineering and manufacturing in this region take me four to six months; my other assignments run between three and six. The lower bound is moving up. That difference of a month seems small until the moment you failed to build it into the plan.
The question from the other side of the table
For the executive or programme manager reading this from a comfortable position, the picture is reversed. This is the region where your profile will carry the most weight in the coming years and this is the period in which organisations are being forced to take succession more seriously. Anyone who wants to be approached at some point needs to be visible today: not once the vacancy exists, because by then the search has already narrowed to a shortlist. An exploratory conversation commits you to nothing. Not having it costs you your view of a market that is unusually favourable to your profile.
What I put to companies in the region
Treat leadership as part of the investment decision. An organisation committing hundreds of millions to installations should determine with equal care who will run those installations in ten years’ time and which layer beneath is being prepared now. That is not a personnel matter but a governance choice, with the same horizon as the investment itself. In practice it means three things: record for each key position who takes over the first ninety days in the event of an unexpected departure, speak each year with two or three external candidates per critical role without a vacancy being open and put succession on the supervisory board agenda at the same moment as the investment budget. Not after it.
In closing
The IJmond has shown in recent years that it can draw up an industrial transformation. Whether that transformation is also carried out depends on people who will still be here in ten years. That is a governance question, not a technical one.
My office is at Buitenplaats Beeckestijn in Velsen-Zuid, minutes from where all of this is happening. Fornell Human Capital operates nationally and is anchored regionally. On 7 October I will be at the first regional gathering of Port of Energy at the BUKO Stadion. I am glad to speak there with executives and supervisory directors from the IJmond about who will carry this region through the transition and equally with the people who could fill those roles themselves.
Fornell Human Capital is an executive search and leadership consultancy based at Buitenplaats Beeckestijn in Velsen-Zuid, the Netherlands.
We advise supervisory boards, executive boards, management teams and owner-directors on appointments at board level.