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Reading this makes me think of organizations which manage to successfully have several generations of competent leadership. Something that has struck me for a while is the contrast in long-term competence between republics (not direct democracies) and hereditary monarchies.
Reading through history, hereditary monarchies always seem to fall into the problem you describe, of incompetent and (physically and mentally) weak monarchs being placed at the head of a nation, leading to a lot of problems. Republics, in contrast, almost always have competent leaders - one might disagree with their goals, and they are too often appointed after their prime, when their health is declining [1], but the leaders of republics are almost always very competent people.
This makes life much better for the people in the republic, and may be in part responsible for the recent proliferation of republics (though it does raise the question of why that hasn't happened sooner. Maybe the robust safeguards implemented by the Founding Fathers of the USA in their constitution were a sufficiently non-obvious, but important, social technology, to be able to make republics viable on the world stage? [2]).
A key difference between monarchies and republics is that each successive generation of leadership in a republic must win an intense competition to secure their position, unlike the heirs of a monarchy. Not only this, but the competitions are usually held quite often (for example, every 4 years in Denmark, every 3 years in New Zealand), which ensures that the competitive nature of the office is kept in the public mind very frequently, making it hard to become a de facto hereditary position. By holding a competition to fill the office, one ensures that, even if the leader doesn't share the same vision as the original founder, they still have to be very competent to be appointed to the position.
I contend that the usual way of appointing successors to small organizations (appointment by the previous leader) and to corporations (elected, but by a small body in a usually non-competitive fashion that is more similar to being appointed on a personal basis) is insufficiently competitive, and so is more similar to a hereditary monarchy than a republic, in this way.
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[1] - This (The fact that the leaders of republics are often elected when their health is in decline) makes me think it may be a good idea to have a constitutional maximum age, after which individuals cannot be elected to certain important offices, to ensure that only people who are in their prime (and hence likely sufficiently healthy) can lead the nation.
[2] - The existence of elective monarchies also is suggestive that the theory may be meaningful, but it again raises the question of why elective monarchies weren't more prominent. Maybe in practice elective monarchies were too likely to become effectively hereditary monarchies in all but name (c.f. the Hungarian kingdom and the Holy Roman Empire), that they didn't distinguish themselves enough to have a competitive advantage.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.