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This column is brought to you by arrangement with The New York Times Syndicate. You can e-mail the authors at winning@nytimes.com, include your name, occupation, city and country.

How far should I go to keep a star performer who has an offer to work at a competitor?
–Hymie Betesh, New York

Not as far as you're probably considering, we imagine, given the panic that strikes most managers when a star threatens to shoot out the door. But before we expand on that answer, let us thank you for being one of the first people to ask us about the ‘care and feeding’ of top performers, which has more to do with a company's success than virtually any other factor. After all, the team that fields the best players usually wins, doesn't it?

But the vast majority of people management questions we receive, both through this column and during our travels, pertain to the management of employees who are floundering. We hear, "Isn't it cruel and heartless to each year let go of the people with the worst performance and least potential?" To which we answer, "Just the opposite. Poor performers need to know where they stand in the organisation, so they can start looking for the kind of work in which they will excel for the long-term."

Sorry to digress; underperformance, obviously, is not your problem. That should be a good thing, and typically it is. Under normal circumstances, to keep stars happy, you just need to give them what they crave: outsized compensation, effusive recognition, enjoyable, challenging work and the feeling of not being micro-managed. But all that changes in a split-second when a star asks to see you, closes your office door and says, "I've gotten an offer I think I just can't refuse." Your first instinct, of course, will be to match the offer financially. Usually, though, that won't be enough; the competitor luring your star has been smart enough to make the deal richer in other ways with, say, more job responsibility or a bigger title. You can match those too. And that's where the trouble starts.

Promoting your star into a new role just to keep him can incite a little riot, especially if the promotion is over people who feel they deserve the same kind of treatment, but just haven't threatened to leave. Before you know it, your other stars will be insulted by your accommodation, and even some middle-range performers will feel resentful. And at the end of it all, the only contented person left in the place might be your over-performer, who has decided to stay, now feeling more indispensable than ever.

Sounds deadly? It is. We recommend a more proactive approach. During the normal course of business, make the management of your stars a top priority. Never take them for granted, and make sure all of your managers understand that star retention a key performance measure.

But at the same time, remember that top performers sometimes leave simply because they have outgrown the opportunities at your company. With their performance, they have earned the chance to reach for horizons beyond what you can offer them in the long haul.

And because of that reality, you must always be prepared to fill in behind any key person who departs, no matter what the size of the business. That's the beauty of a rigorous human resource programme, with frequent performance reviews, consistent coaching, and the kind of backup planning for every key position that can readily answer the question, "Who replaces George or Carol if they leave?" Such back-up planning, by the way, must happen at least annually.

Instead, it must be conducted with the gritty intensity of a war game. Only then will your organisation be able to replace a departing star within eight hours – yes, eight. Only then will your organisation be able to send the important message that no star is bigger than the organisation.

Sometimes companies need to change even when there is not a crisis forcing the issue. In such cases, how do you keep your people excited about a change initiative after its newness has worn off?
–Trevor Smith, Singapore

You have to stay excited yourself. And not just excited, but obsessed. Talk about the initiative at every meeting, celebrate its smallest milestones and champion everyone who supports it as much as you do. If there is one reason that even the most meaningful initiatives too often die an ignoble death, it's boredom.

If people – sometimes even the leaders who started the whole thing – don't see immediate results, they may begin to get distracted by concerns that seem more pressing. And, before you know it, 'pffft'. The initiative that was supposed to change everything has vanished into thin air. At which point, everyone sighs from relief. Or, worse, they quietly chuckle at the inevitable demise of yet another lame change programme.

Such entirely human sighing or chuckling would be fine, of course, if change weren't a matter of life and death. OK, that sounds overly dramatic. But in today's marketplace, if you don't keep reinventing your company's way of doing business, you'll be trampled by the competitors passing you by. Which is why you have to continuously cheerlead your change initiative – and more too. Indeed, you also have to avoid three traps that, while perfectly understandable, have a way of speeding initiatives into oblivion.

The first is launching another big, important initiative while your first big, important initiative is still a work in progress. Now, we're not putting a kibosh on new tactics or projects while an initiative is under way. But tactics, like a focus on purchasing, or projects, like a special sales contest, are not initiatives. Initiatives are transformative, like globalisation. The best start as the seed of an idea that grows into a forest that eventually encompasses almost every activity across the company, sometimes even bringing customers and suppliers into the fold. And that is why a company can only handle one initiative at a time, switching only after the first is ingrained in the culture, which can easily take two or three years, if not longer.

The second trap is not putting the company's best people on a change initiative. Oh, sure, we realise that it's hard to take Ellen and Mario out of the jobs they're so good at to put them onto something so new and risky. But that's the kind of talent shake-up that makes an organisation believe, not to mention the kind that makes an initiative thrive and succeed.

The third trap is related. It's not publicly promoting and rewarding the people who do embrace the initiative. Even when the initiative's results are still emerging, these individuals have to be held up as role models and heroes, and treated accordingly. Do that, and people will enlist in your cause faster than you can count them.

And that's what you want. Even with strong management support, no initiative has ever succeeded without widespread engagement. You're right. The early days are easy; the hard part comes when the newness gets old. The trick is to never let that happen.

What are some of the best approaches to improve marketing?
–Linda Schanz, Edison, N.J.

Not long ago, we were helping our son get ready for college and noticed a hefty section in his course catalogue entitled, 'Topics in Sales and Marketing'. With that in mind, we humbly note that your question is bigger than the both of us. Indeed, marketing has become an increasingly complex science of data mining, number slicing and niche segmenting.

But since you asked... we would only add that, in our view, sales and marketing will always contain an element of art. Consider two terrific campaigns that just took place in connection with baseball's World Series.

In the first, a Boston company, Jordan's, promised full refunds on all the furniture sold in its stores between March 7 and April 16 if the Red Sox won this October. The team did win and the company's leaders have been on TV ever since, congratulating the 30,000 customers who are now receiving refunds on US$20mn worth of stuff.

In the second, Taco Bell promised to give away a taco to every person in the US if a base was stolen during the series. The young Red Sox star Jacoby Ellsbury did the honours, and Taco Bell reaped untold millions in publicity with the happy stampede that followed. Enough! We'll leave sales and marketing advice to the experts, simply noting that, when all is said and done, a clever idea can still score big.

What companies would you hold up as examples of succession planning done right?
–Robert Handfield, Raleigh, N.C.

It's sad to say, but your question would be a heck of a lot easier to answer if you had asked for examples of succession planning done wrong. That trend is gaining such ground these days it's alarming.

For instance, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch recently lost their CEOs, and it quickly became obvious that neither company had a successor in the wings. What people didn't know was how such a thing could possibly happen.

Not to avoid your question. Certainly many examples of outstanding succession planning exist, like Johnson & Johnson, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Caterpillar. Indeed, research shows that well over 50 per cent of companies typically promote their CEOs from within. Such companies obviously understand one of the most fundamental tenets of business: A well-crafted succession plan vastly minimises disruption when any CEO leaves, expectedly or not. At the extreme, imagine what it felt like inside Citigroup and Merrill Lynch in the weeks after their CEOs departed. People all over the company were asking themselves, "What will happen to me in this mess?" and "What will the devil-we-don't-know be like?" So long productivity! In-house succession has the added virtue of being cheaper, as an outside hire almost always requires enough money to fill an armoured car.

But if good succession planning makes so much sense, why isn't it more common? Well, sometimes a board must go outside to shake things up. IBM turned to Lou Gerstner, then at Nabisco, for instance, when it wanted to transform its culture in 1993. More recently, the German company Siemens hired Peter Loescher from Merck to separate itself from long-standing practices that had damaged its image. In still other cases, a company can have a controlling shareholder who wants to do succession his way. Viacom's Sumner Redstone and Fidelity's Ned Johnson come to mind.

But when a change effort or a controlling shareholder are not the case, and succession planning still doesn't happen, the fault can only lie with the board. Sure, boards have other big responsibilities, like grappling with the CEO over growth opportunities and strategy. But we'd suggest two other reasons why succession planning can fall off a board's agenda.

The first we've written about before: So-called shareholder activists have lately pressured boards into a bunker mentality, in which they obsess over the minutia of financial reports. We say so-called because no real shareholders would ever want their boards to fixate on rounding errors rather than growth and succession.

Obviously, we're not saying that boards should ignore financials, but no board member, flying in once a month to pour over reams of data, is ever going to uncover a scheme. That's why the board's job when it comes to financial oversight is to make sure management has the control systems and high-integrity people in place that will.

The second reason is more emotional, in that the topic can be, well, so awkward. After all, succession planning requires boards to talk candidly about what qualities are missing in the current CEO and the timing of his or her departure, and it compels the current CEO to chime in on these matters without seeming defensive. The whole thing is sort of like a married couple trying to have a conversation about who the perfect replacement spouse would be. Pretty squirm-worthy stuff.

Now, we've heard it said that boards don't have good succession plans because senior management ranks are so thin in today's perform or die cultures. We'd spin that argument to say that if senior management ranks are thin, it is because so few companies are thinking about succession and thus asking their people to take on cross-functional assignments. They allow them to rise to the top of their silos and then retire.

This dynamic is particularly prevalent in financial institutions, where there is virtually no crossover among trading and retail and investment banking because of expertise demands and compensation differentials. The one notable exception is JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who basically acted as Sandy Weill's junior partner for 16 years, building expansive business experience and knowledge along the way. Alas, Jamie Dimon cannot run everything! Nor can financial company boards keep scrambling to find someone like him when their CEO walks away. Succession planning has got to be deliberate. It has to be a discipline. And if boards don't impose that on themselves, perhaps authentic shareholder activists will soon.