When John Walters, Michael Ovitz and Gil Amelio were dumped by AT & T;, Walt Disney Co. and Apple Computer, criticism focused not simply on the performance of the executives themselves, but on the corporate boards that hired them. And rightly so.

Like directors of many other boards, the directors of the above companies are guilty of more than making a single bad hiring decision. They failed to effectively manage executive development within the ranks of their own organizations, resulting in a high-risk approach to finding a new CEO looking outside their companies for leadership.

For the last two years, we have studied the performance of corporate boards in order to determine what factors contribute to their effectiveness. Directors on these boards claim they make executive selection and development a top priority, according to our research. But if boards are so focused on CEO selection, why do they get it wrong?

An obvious reason is that the number of executives capable of leading the difficult transformations being undergone by corporations like AT & T; and Apple is extremely limited. So companies have to take risks. And with risk comes failure.

But there is another crucial reason why boards, despite their best efforts and intentions, make poor CEO choices. Simply stated, they lack the skills and knowledge necessary to make good selection and development decisions.

The board of the typical Fortune 1000 corporation has no director whose primary expertise is management development, organizational design or strategic change management. This is an enormous void at a time when leading strategy experts stress that a crucial competitive advantage can be derived from the way a firm is organized.

It is a particularly glaring omission in the case of companies like AT & T; and Apple, where the CEO job calls for someone who is not only a skilled manager, but a person who can lead a strategically driven change effort.

When we ask board members to name the person on their boards who has expertise in management development and organizational change, they inevitably cite the directors who are or were CEOs. Current or ex-CEOs fill the most seats on large corporate boards and are an understandable place to look in the absence of anyone who is a professional in this area. But this is a tremendous risk.

Years of psychological research on the hiring process shows that individuals are likely to select job candidates who are like themselves. Many of the CEOs on boards are retired executives who led corporations in an earlier era when the best thinking about management practices and strategy was quite different than it is today. Thus, boards often end up choosing CEOs who are more comfortable with the “old school” approaches to management and not individuals who are prepared to lead major corporations into the 21st century.

This problem was compounded in the cases of AT & T;, Disney and Apple because the CEOs of these companies dominated the process of choosing a successor. That’s typical, according to the latest Korn Ferry corporate governance survey, which found that the CEOs in most large companies still wield a disproportionate amount of influence over the choice of their successors.

At Apple, for example, company founder Steve Jobs is now leading the process of identifying a new leader, making it that much harder to find a candidate willing and able to take on the challenge of saving this corporation.

At least AT & T; appears to have recognized the errors of its ways and is excluding current CEO Robert Allen from the committee that will choose his replacement.

Boards also favor using outside experts to help them find a new CEO, something both AT & T; and Apple did when they hired top executive search firms to identify a short list of candidates. But this type of outside assistance, while useful, is no substitute for in-depth, continuing expertise in matching the strategic requirements of the organization with the type of CEO and executive development process that is required.

Can corporations find board members with expertise in management development, executive selection and strategic organizational change? Judging by the number of books that are written every year on these topics, the answer is yes.

There are a number of academics, consultants and executives in major corporations who have this expertise and could be added to boards. Given the growing strategic importance of executive selection and development and organization design, their absence represents an omission that needs to be corrected.

Just look at where AT & T;, Disney and Apple find themselves now. To use the parlance of mariners, they are like ocean-going vessels without an experienced captain at the helm who knows both the capabilities and limitations of its crew and ship well. And as always in the corporate world, there is the certainty that somewhere, sometime, a storm looms ahead.

Edward E. Lawler III is a research professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and author of “From the Ground Up: Six Principles for Building the New Logic Corporation” (Jossey-Bass, 1996). David Finegold is an assistant research professor at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC.