More US firms lean on retired, veteran leaders to steady ship in choppy economy

By Shivansh Tiwary and Aishwarya Venugopal

(Reuters) -CVS Health last week named as CEO a tried-and-tested company veteran, the latest in a handful of firms this year that have turned to an experienced executive to take the helm, hoping to quell investor concerns amid economic uncertainty.

Following pressure from an activist investor, CVS hired David Joyner to replace Karen Lynch. During her three-and-a-half year tenure, CVS' stock fell nearly 11%. The company has cut its 2024 profit forecast three times, blaming an increase in Medicare-related costs.

A few weeks earlier, Nike had hired former senior executive Elliott Hill to succeed John Donahoe as president and CEO, as it efforts to revive sales and battle competition.

Boeing named aerospace industry veteran Kelly Ortberg as its CEO earlier this year to turn around the planemaker beset by legal and regulatory problems.

"Investors tend to be comforted when someone with a track record comes in," said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Wisconsin-based Annex Wealth Management.

"It's one thing if there is a new division or new opportunity, but when there are challenging times, investors often prefer someone who has been through a few economic cycles."

A record number of CEOs have quit in the U.S. this year.

CEO departures jumped 15% to 1,450 between January and August, from the same period a year earlier, according to a report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. The report cited economic uncertainty as one of the main reasons for leadership changes.

On Monday, Walt Disney named Morgan Stanley veteran James Gorman as chair. Gorman had already been tasked with finding a replacement for Disney CEO Bob Iger, a Wall Street favorite who retired from the company in 2021, only to return the next year to deal with a pandemic-related slump.

"The pandemic and subsequent economic challenges led some companies to prioritize stability, experience, and redundancies over innovation and disruption, bringing in experienced leaders to implement immediate turnaround strategies ... rather than for long-term transformation," said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital.

The strategy has, however, met with mixed success.

Famously, Apple founder Steve Jobs left the company in 1985 over differences with then-CEO John Sculley, returning a dozen years later to architect the iPhone. Howard Schultz has held the top job at Starbucks three different times, setting the coffee chain back on track each time its sales faltered.

But things have not worked out the same way for several major American corporations who brought back former CEOs including Dell, Twitter, and consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble.

P&G, for instance, brought back former CEO Alan Lafley in 2013 to reinvigorate sales, but his second tenure was much less fruitful. He was replaced with another company veteran in roughly two years.

Executives who come back to the fold, known as "boomerang CEOs", may either be unable or unwilling to make necessary strategic changes when they return, according to a research paper featured in the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2020.

The annual stock performance of companies led by such CEOs was 10% lower on an average than their first-stint counterparts, the report showed.

"Not everyone is Jobs ... Returning CEOs are usually overconfident, which, when combined with their difficulty of adopting to the constantly evolving business environment, may exacerbate the damage caused by their stubborn fixation on old strategies," said Xu Jiang, associate professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

(Reporting by Aishwarya Venugopal and Shivansh Tiwary in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Sriraj Kalluvila)