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By JULIET CHUNG

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.

$1.05 million

A 3,700-square-foot home, with three bedrooms and three baths, on 0.75 acre looking over the 18th hole of a private golf course

DETAILS: This single-story, Southwest contemporary-style home, built in 1991, has a U-shaped floor plan, beamed ceilings and a two-way fireplace dividing the kitchen from the family room. There’s a pool and mountain views.

FORE!: Troon Country Club has a 50,000-square-foot clubhouse with spa and exercise facilities, as well as a pool and tennis courts

REFUELING: The Quail’s Nest and Lounge, in the clubhouse, offers free hors d’oeuvres, including oysters on the half-shell and sliders, after a round of golf.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Partly cloudy, high 86 degrees

SOURCE:
Margy Senna, Russ Lyon Sotheby’s International Realty, 602-622-1388, margy@azgolfproperties.com

BOCA RATON, Fla.

$1.05 million

An almost 2,600-square-foot contemporary with three bedrooms and three baths, on 0.25 acre, overlooking the 15th tee

DETAILS: The home, renovated in 2007, comes furnished and features a double-height great room and dining room, glass walls overlooking a pool and garden and his-and-hers baths in the master suite.

FORE!: The Polo Club of Boca Raton, a gated country-club community, has two private 18-hole golf courses, a 145,000-square-foot clubhouse, a tennis complex and a 40,000-square-foot spa-fitness center.

REFUELING: The Polo Pub, in the clubhouse, offers post-golf dining and complimentary postgame hors d’oeuvres, including wings and hot dogs.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Chance of showers, high 79 degrees

SOURCE:
Thomas Walsh, Premier Estate Properties, a Christie’s Great Estates affiliate, 561-573-2226, thomaswalsh@bellsouth.net

LAS VEGAS

$1.1 million

A 4,200-square-foot Mediterranean-style home with four bedrooms and four baths on 0.25 acre, with views of three fairways

DETAILS: This single-story, 2002 home has several fireplaces and a great room with ceilings of more than 20 feet. A patio overlooks one of the two golf courses. The master bath has a black granite shower.

FORE!: Red Rock Country Club has two Arnold Palmer-designed golf courses—one private, one public (the home overlooks the public course). A roughly 10,000-square-foot sports club features gym, pool, tennis and spa facilities. There’s also a 44,000-square-foot main clubhouse.

REFUELING: The Oasis Grill, on site, serves a shrimp-and-crab BLT with avocado ($14).

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Partly cloudy, high 82 degrees

SOURCE:
Pawel Szott, Realty Executives, 702-349-2131, szott@cox.net; Realtor.com

You’re competing against colleagues in a horse race for a plum executive post. Everyone likes your work, so you expect to win.

You’re wrong. It takes more than superior performance to cross the finish line nowadays, as corporate boards have increased their focus on management succession. At the same time, boards rarely divulge the additional requirements that executives must meet to land a senior spot.

“Most companies do a really bad job of communicating what people need to win,” says John Beeson, a succession-planning consultant and author of “The Unwritten Rules,” a book about executive advancement. “You usually are operating in the dark in a horse race.”

It’s such a mystery that recruiters Spencer Stuart even compiled a handbook for internal candidates. Many questions “arise in the high-stakes dynamics of executive appointments,” the 10-page document says. Nearly 20 companies have used the guide since 2009, estimates James M. Citrin, co-head of Spencer Stuart’s CEO and board practice.

Contests to pick the next chief executive are raging inside big businesses such as Ford Motor Co.,

Intel Corp.,

Pepsico Inc.

and Walt Disney Co.

Though a number of companies hire outsiders, moving up still represents the most common route to the top.

Ford Motor Company

Ford’s Mark Fields is considered a potential successor to the chief executive Alan Mulally.

I sought strategies for winning a horse race from executives who’ve run one—plus recruiters, directors and coaches. Each cited numerous little-known rules that you should heed while vying to become a C-suite executive or subsidiary president. Among them:

Avoid premature coronation in the media.

Being touted too soon as the heir apparent will magnify any minor gaffes you make. You also risk creating factions because “co-workers often spend time unproductively trying to figure out how the succession will play out,” warns Greg Brenneman, a former CEO of Burger King Corp. and two other concerns. He has observed multiple horse races as a director of four public companies.

Mark Fields, president of Ford’s operations in North and South America, already broke this rule. He’s considered a candidate to succeed Alan Mulally, who will likely leave his post at auto maker within two years. Last month, Mr. Fields cooperated on a prominent New York Times

profile. “Ford’s Mr. Inside, In Sight of the Crown,” its headline read.

Mr. Fields told the Times that his business unit had “a lot to celebrate,” but ducked a question about his chances to run Ford. In an interview with the Journal, a person close to the company emphasizes that “he is not the only internal candidate.”

“Mark is absolutely focused on running the Americas and contributing to Ford’s profitable growth,” a spokeswoman says.

Anticipate long auditions.

Horse races can last years. Last October, Disney announced that Robert Iger will give up the corner office in March 2015. The move has set up a protracted contest between Thomas Staggs, leader of the theme-park division, and Jay Rasulo, chief financial officer.

By signaling his exit far in advance, Mr. Iger puts extraordinary pressure on those executives. Mr. Iger “operated as if in a glass house” before Disney directors promoted him to CEO from president, according to the Spencer Stuart handbook. Disney declined to comment.

You’re always on display during a horse race partly because boards constantly assess internal contenders “without being obvious,” observes Dennis Carey, a vice chairman of recruiters Korn/Ferry International

. However, Mr. Citrin cautions, your candidacy may fail “if you appear to be constantly performing for an audience rather than just doing your job well.”

Give lieutenants extra credit.

A successful retail-industry executive says this advice helped him win a hotly contested internal horse race years ago. A trusted inside mentor urged him to stop using the word “I” and “regularly distribute credit for results,” he explains.

In bestowing bouquets, however, “make sure your fingerprints are on the accomplishments,” consultant Mr. Beeson suggests. So you should introduce and conclude your team’s presentation to the big brass about an important initiative, he adds.

Though a corporate board will never say so, “it’s also smart to absorb all the blame for missteps,” says John Wood, a vice chairman of recruiters Heidrick & Struggles International Inc.

Befriend your rivals.

In late February, Johnson & Johnson tapped Alex Gorsky as its next leader starting this spring. His main competitor was fellow vice chairman Sheri McCoy.

The executives appear to enjoy a close bond and “had an understanding between them that ‘if you win, I will work for you’ – and vice versa,”’ a drug-industry recruiter recalls. Mr. Gorsky may keep Ms. McCoy by making her chief operating officer, say people close to the company.

“The board is very eager to see the two of them run J&J for the next ten years,” notes one such individual. J&J declined to comment.

Distinguish yourself from the incumbent.

You must walk a fine line between being a strong team player and showing “you actually have the chops to do the job,” a food-industry executive says. He says he recently lost a horse race largely over this sticky issue.

Demonstrating loyalty and independence simultaneously “is an art,” agrees David Dotlich, chairman of Pivot Leadership LLC, an executive-coaching firm. His solution? Alert the incumbent before any public challenge, and don’t attack topics he or she cares deeply about.

Greed is not good.

In 2009, a media-industry executive was the internal front-runner to become a group head, reporting to the CEO. Althought they offered him the position, he failed to secure the job.

Pay negotiations began, and the executive demanded a package “that essentially matched what the long-serving incumbent had,” remembers Mr. Citrin, who led the search. “The board found it distasteful.”

The unsuccessful candidate soon quit.

Write to Joann S. Lublin at joann.lublin@wsj.com

By ARNIE COOPER

Los Angeles

While Sisyphus had a mountain to contend with, at least he and his rock didn’t have to navigate a 105-mile route through Los Angeles suburbs or negotiate a bureaucratic maze of city, state and county officials to obtain permits. But those were only some of the challenges of getting the 21½-foot-tall, 340-ton granite hunk that forms the centerpiece of Michael Heizer’s sculpture “Levitated Mass” to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (The work is expected to open to the public by early summer.) The move—from a distant quarry in Riverside, across three counties—was an engineering feat requiring, among many other things, a custom-built 200-foot-long transporter with 196 wheels. Average speed: about five miles per hour.

Mark Albrecht is a project manager at Emmert International, the company responsible for moving the rock. “We’ve done the Hubble telescope, a lot of different rocket components for Boeing, as well as 750-800-ton refinery vehicles,” he says. “But this is the first time we’ve moved a rock.”

According to William Poundstone, who blogs at “Los Angeles County Museum on Fire,” it’s the 11th-largest moved monolith in history. (First place is reserved for the 1,250-ton “Thunder Stone,” which served as the base for Etienne Maurice Falconet’s “Bronze Horseman” in St. Petersburg and took 400 men nine months to move.) Or perhaps it is 14th-largest, Mr. Poundstone writes, referring to some double entries from his source, Wikipedia. Still, by all scientific accounts this monster is huge.

And that’s why the endeavor required a pair of 600-horsepower push-and-pull trucks, along with dozens of workers leading and following to displace and restore countless traffic lights, utility poles and the occasional pesky palm tree to make way for the shiny red caravan.

No wonder the rock—shrink-wrapped in plastic, along patches of high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets underneath, to keep it from rubbing against any hard surfaces encountered—didn’t make the turn onto Wilshire Boulevard until the wee hours of Saturday morning, nearly eight months behind schedule. And according to Lacma’s director, Michael Govan, it was well worth waiting for. He says “Levitated Mass” will constitute one of Los Angeles’s most important art works. “I don’t like to use the word ‘masterpiece’ so often,” he says, “but I think it’s going to be that category of work.” More on the art and its elusive creator later.

The trip began on Feb. 29 at about 10 p.m. To avoid a potential Carmageddon, each of the route’s 11 segments had to be completed between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., though an exception was made after some hill trouble on the fourth night.

And you think you have problems finding parking? Just imagine how you’d contend with a vehicle longer than an Olympic-size swimming pool that takes up nearly three lanes. Indeed, one significant reason for the hold-up was getting municipalities to agree to let Emmert “park” it on the road.

Naturally, having such a mammoth rig sitting in the middle of the street brought out hordes of gawkers clicking away with their smartphones. The most notable and organized session took place on March 7 when 20,000 people descended on the Bixby Knolls section of Long Beach to glimpse the monolith. The daylong “Rockapalooza,” sponsored by a local business organization, featured street artists, T-shirts emblazoned with “Bixby Knolls Gets Rocked,” food stands hawking RockStar energy drinks and Pop Rocks candy, and musical selections including “Rocky Mountain High,” “We Will Rock You” and “I Love Rock and Roll.”

So what does the artist think of all the hoopla? The reclusive 67-year-old Mr. Heizer, currently living in Nevada, has yet to grant any interviews to the press and wasn’t even present for the rock’s arrival. This shouldn’t be considered unusual, suggests Mr. Govan, now acting as Mr. Heizer’s de-facto spokesman: “Michelangelo, for example, was a very solitary man and didn’t go to parties. The idea that an artist must be a public person to make public works has not been borne out.” Moreover, Mr. Govan says, “It’s not as if we didn’t know it would be a big deal to move something like this down Wilshire Boulevard through whatever path it had to take. What’s often forgotten is that the public has a role in art history, whether it’s the Mona Lisa or this piece, ‘Levitated Mass.’”

Still, with all the hype fostered by the $10-million moving fee (all paid by private donors), several false starts and the inevitable ooh-ing and ah-ing at the engineering feat required to deliver the sculpture, it appears that the “art” itself has at least for now been forgotten. Mr. Govan is unfazed. “All this will fade with time. But I think for the people who were there on Saturday, they will have the fun of saying, ‘Oh, I remember when it was moved.’”

In fact, Mr. Govan insists that the move itself and the sculpture are not “discordant.” As he likes to say, the piece is going to be both the oldest and newest work in the museum’s collection. “Obviously it’s made now by a living artist, but it has echoes of the most ancient aspects of art and art history. And transporting the 900-million-year-old rock has two meanings. One, it refers very specifically to the origins of civilization and the early impulse to move megaliths. Plus, it’s interesting to replay that in a contemporary context with modern engineering.”

Last weekend, the museum revealed, albeit temporarily, the other main element of this permanent sculpture, “The Slot,” a 456-foot-long, concrete-lined trench adjacent to the Resnick Pavilion. When the whole enterprise is finished, visitors will be able to follow a 15-foot-wide pathway down to a central chamber underneath the rock’s pyramidal form, which will ultimately rest on concrete rails. “As Heizer says, you never get to see the bottom of a sculpture,” Mr. Govan says with a laugh.

Museum-goers will also be able to gain at least a partial appreciation for the genre of “land art,” which Mr. Heizer pioneered back in the late 1960s with “Double Negative.” That iconic work featured two trenches, each 50 feet deep and 30 feet wide, measuring a total of 1,500 feet in length created by removing 240,000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone from a mesa northwest of Overton, Nevada.

It was also around that time that Mr. Heizer first conceived of “Levitated Mass.” Says Mr. Govan: “It was not only in his head; he got as far as actually digging the trench.” Alas, it was never finished, but “when this thing got blasted off the mountain in 2005, it was one of the most beautiful rocks he’d ever seen, and he immediately knew what to do with it.”

To be honest, unless you’re within touching distance, the rock in its current position gets dwarfed by the mammoth red-and-white transporter. Yet when you consider the herculean challenge of getting it here, even in today’s high-tech world, you can’t help feeling awestruck by the natural world and humanity’s relative insignificance.

Mr. Cooper is a freelance writer in Santa Barbara, Calif.

A version of this article appeared March 15, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Arrival of a Rock Star.