By: Vincent Caradec, Co-Founder and CEO, Healthi Life
Boards spend months on succession planning and almost no time on the thing most likely to trigger it.
Key person risk sits in the risk register of nearly every company with a founder or a dominant chief executive. It gets described in the language of insurance: what happens if this person leaves, is poached, or becomes unavailable. What almost never gets discussed in the room is the most probable route to unavailability, which is not a competitor and not a resignation letter. It is a cardiac event, a cancer found late, or the slow cognitive erosion of a decade of four-hour nights.
Companies treat that as a private matter. It is a corporate one.
The Costs Are Already On The Books
The economic burden of poor health among working populations is well documented, and most of it does not appear as medical spending. It appears as absence, as reduced output while present, and as turnover. Employers carry those costs whether or not they measure them.
At the executive level, the arithmetic gets sharper. The cost of a chief executive absent for six months is not their salary. It is the deal that stalled, the hiring decision nobody else would make, the investor relationship that ran through one person. For a company of any size, that number moves fast into the millions, and none of it is insured against in any practical sense.
Boards accept a version of this logic elsewhere without argument. Nobody questions the cost of an annual audit, or of penetration testing, or of a legal retainer. All three exist to detect a problem while it is still cheap. The health of the people the company depends on gets no equivalent process.
Annual Physicals Were Not Designed For This
The standard executive physical was built to catch disease. It is reasonably good at that, and it is the wrong instrument for the question a board should be asking.
A conventional check-up returns results as normal or abnormal, measured against a population range. That binary is the point when the goal is diagnosis. It is close to useless when the goal is to see a trajectory. A marker sitting comfortably inside the reference range while moving steadily in the wrong direction for four consecutive years is invisible to a system that only reports whether it crossed a line.
The clinically useful question is not whether this person is ill today. It is whether the direction of travel, projected forward, puts them in trouble during the years the company most depends on them. Answering that requires the same panel measured repeatedly, read by someone who has seen the previous results, with a plan attached to what the numbers show.
That is a different discipline from an annual appointment, and it is where longevity medicine has become genuinely useful to companies rather than merely fashionable.
What A Serious Programme Actually Involves
Three things, none of them exotic.
A broad baseline rather than a narrow one. Cardiovascular risk assessed with the markers that predict events rather than the ones that are cheapest to run. Metabolic health measured before it becomes a diagnosis. Inflammatory status, hormonal function, and the deficiencies that quietly degrade energy and mood in people who assume they are simply tired.
Repetition on a schedule, because a single measurement is a snapshot and the information lives in the change between two of them.
And a physician who owns the relationship over years, which is the part companies most often skip when they buy a screening package as a benefit line item. Data without someone accountable for interpreting it produces a PDF nobody opens.
An executive health programme built that way is a monitoring function. It resembles internal audit more than it resembles a spa.
The Objection, And The Answer To It
The obvious pushback is privacy. An executive’s medical results are theirs, and no board should see them. That is correct, and it is not an obstacle.
The board does not need the data. It needs to know that a process exists, that it runs on a schedule, and that it is overseen by someone qualified. The same separation applies to any privileged information a company handles. Governance is about the existence and integrity of the process, not about access to the contents.
The second objection is that this reads as a perk for people who already have plenty. That confuses who benefits. Shareholders have a direct interest in the continuity of the person the company depends on, and in knowing that the risk is tracked rather than assumed away. The process exists because the company carries the exposure, not because the chief executive wants attention.
Where This Is Heading
Institutional investors already ask about succession planning and about the concentration of authority in a single person. Extending that to whether the company monitors the health of the people it depends on is a small step, and I expect it within the next few years.
The companies that get there first will not be the ones with the best-appointed executive lounges. They will be the ones that stopped treating the chief executive’s biology as a personal matter and started treating it as an asset with a maintenance schedule.
Everything else in the risk register already gets one.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Readers should consult a qualified healthcare professional regarding their individual health needs.
