Boomerang CEOs: Do they ever succeed?

An ASU expert discusses the success of CEOs who come back to the companies they left, including Steve Jobs and Howard Schultz.

In this story aired Feb. 8, 2024, on the BBC:

These boomerang CEOs, the ones who come back, tend to perform worse in general. But the founder CEOs who came back performed especially worse, at least in our data. In the case of WeWork, that would make me nervous because Adam Neumann’s original vision for the company led to some disasters. We looked at over 6,000 CEO successions… less than 200 of them were boomerang CEOs… like a celebrity CEO that would come back. And I think a lot of that is we know they did a great job last time.

– Travis Howell, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship