Baton Passing

You're seeing Baton Passing when a founder steps back from a role and the successor loses six months re-learning context that was never transferred. The baton was dropped, not passed.

You're seeing Baton Passing when a product moves from design to engineering and critical intent gets lost because there was no structured handoff. Each team ran fast; the transition was the failure.

Audit your company for baton-pass failures. Where do projects stall between teams? Where does context vanish when people change roles? Build explicit overlap periods for critical transitions and make handoff quality a metric, not an assumption.

Disney understood that creative projects live or die in transitions — from story to storyboard, storyboard to animation, animation to sound and music. He built the "sweatbox" review process to ensure each handoff preserved creative intent. When the baton passed from one department to another, Disney personally monitored the transfer, catching drops before they compounded. His larger failure was the ultimate baton pass: succession. His sudden death left no clear plan, and Disney's company drifted for decades. Founders should learn both lessons — engineer every operational handoff, and plan the leadership transition before it's forced upon you.