Richard Goyder’s Woodside shuffle
On the finish line of his career, Goyder learns how to manage succession.
It was quite a day on Wednesday for CEO succession in the ASX 20, with both Australia's second (BHP) and eleventh (Woodside) largest public companies appointing new leadership. A curiosity of this double act is that one executive, BHP's Australia boss Geraldine Slattery, was a candidate for both jobs but landed neither.
Slattery and the two internal candidates who missed out at Woodside – Mark Abbottsford and Daniel Kalms – are presumably now on the market. In a universe where the Santos board wasn't abjectly hopeless and captured by chief executive Kevin Gallagher (the other Gallagher brother), the Santos board would be circling unloved executives of this calibre. Sadly, that's not a universe we occupy. Gallagher's enabler Keith Spence will retire as chair next year, and inevitably Gallagher will seek to install another patsy so he can push on to Alan Joyce-like bounds of tenure.
We all remember Gallagher putting himself in the running for the Woodside job back in 2021, which amazingly led the Santos board to provide him with a $6 million retention grant. It's only a wonder he didn't try that one on again.
