Management succession plans

p = 107/210 = 0.510  had management succession plans

Use this diagram to explain that the distributions of the count of successes, proportion of successes and estimation error all have distributions with the same shape but different scaling.

(Note that the sample proportion, p, is used instead of the unknown π to draw the distributions and evaluate the se.)

Mention that the error distribution is particularly important — its standard deviation is the standard error.

We estimate that 0.510 of all such companies have management succession plans. From the error distribution, it is unlikely that this estimate will be in error by more than 0.1.


Many small companies do not worry about the consequences of executives resigning, despite the disruption that this can cause to the company.

Coopers & Lybrand surveyed 210 chief executives of fast-growing small companies and the table below shows the number whose companies had a management succession plan to deal with such departures.

Management succession plan?     Frequency
Yes 107
No 103
Total     210