What can you say about an organization that has nearly $100 million in annual revenue, $150 million in the bank and a huge national membership but seems to be in no big hurry to name a new leader after the old one retires?

If this were a publicly traded company, stockholders and Wall Street would be getting pretty antsy and asking a lot of pointed questions. But this is a not-for-profit organization that isn’t bound by those silly business rules. Yes, I’m taking about SHRM—the Society for Human Resource Management.

I’m often critical of SHRM (as others are critical of me for being so critical), and it is largely because of things like this. To wit: letting the organization drift for six months after the old CEO announces her retirement. In other words, why hasn’t the SHRM board gotten its act together and hired someone already?

Sue Meisinger announced her retirement as the organization’s CEO on January 8  and said at the time that she would “remain at SHRM until a new CEO is selected to ensure a smooth transition.” I believe she was being honest when she said that because she thought the SHRM board of directors would move fairly quickly to find and name a successor.

In fact, I thought that it would happen at the annual conference in Chicago last month, because it offered the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to Meisinger, welcome the new leader and have a very visible passing of the baton from the old to the new. But clearly even Meisinger, the ultimate SHRM trouper, got tired of waiting for the board to act and her successor to be named. She left June 30, with SHRM saying at that time that they would have a new leader named by August 1. China Miner Gorman, SHRM’s chief operating officer, is the acting CEO.

I hope the SHRM board of directors follows through and names a new CEO this week, as they’ve indicated, but I’m not holding my breath. As I wrote from the SHRM conference last month, I think the board missed a marvelous opportunity to help the organization make a smooth transition to the future, but it would be well worth the wait if it was because the board was nailing down the perfect candidate to lead SHRM into the future.

And who would that person be?

That’s easy to answer: It should be someone like former SHRM chief executive Mike Losey, a strong businessperson with top leadership experience who knows how to drive an organization ahead. Or it could be a creative, experienced, strategic HR professional—someone like former Home Depot HR chief Dennis Donovan. (Donovan, it should be noted, already has a pretty interesting job—running HR for Cerberus Capital Management.) In any event, SHRM needs someone strongly grounded in business and managing people, and not a bureaucrat or organization professional.

How hard is this executive search, anyway? Do you have any ideas on whom SHRM should name CEO? Have you heard any chat on the grapevine about candidates? Feel free to send any thoughts to me at jhollon@workforce.com or add them to the bottom of this post. If the SHRM board fails to deliver a candidate by August 1, they may need some help from all of us getting this CEO thing figured out.