You spend 20 years climbing the corporate ladder. Then a retiree takes the top job
· Fortune
Cracker Barrel’s decision to recruit 69-year-old David Deno after his retirement belongs to a striking series of corporate recalls. Nike brought Elliott Hill back four years after he retired, Verizon recruited Dan Schulman after he retired from PayPal, and Disney famously returned Bob Iger to its top job.
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For boards, the appeal is straightforward. As my colleague Phil Wahba explains, when a company is under pressure, a leader who has already run a major business can look safer than someone taking the top job for the first time. That preference for proven leaders is showing up in the numbers. Russell Reynolds Associates found that 34% of CEOs appointed by S&P 500 companies in the first half of 2026 had previously led a public company, up from 22% a year earlier.
But another consequence of reaching back for proven leaders is this: Every retired CEO who returns takes a job that might otherwise have created an opening for someone coming up behind them.
Corporate hierarchies depend on vacancies. When a CEO retires, and a division president moves up, someone replaces the division president, another executive fills that person’s job, and opportunities can cascade several levels down. Bringing someone back from retirement interrupts that chain at the very top. One appointment can therefore delay multiple promotions beneath it.
That matters because companies spend years asking ambitious executives to prepare for those openings. Promising leaders relocate, run troubled divisions, take international assignments and build profit-and-loss experience partly to make themselves credible candidates for bigger jobs. When the biggest job instead goes to someone whose career had already ended, those executives get a different message about the value of that preparation.
The effects can compound. Passed-over executives may leave for competitors or start their own businesses, further thinning the internal bench. Those who remain may become less willing to make personal sacrifices for advancement that looks less attainable. And employees several rungs below the C-suite are watching those decisions long before they become CEO candidates themselves.
There is also a diversity implication. Today’s retired CEO pool was largely created during an era when corporate leadership was less diverse. Making previous CEO experience the safest credential in a crisis can therefore pull boards toward a leadership pool shaped by the demographics of an earlier corporate era—even as companies have spent years building more diverse pipelines underneath it.
None of this means boards should avoid experienced CEOs when a business genuinely needs one, as Wahba notes. But solving an immediate succession problem by reaching backward could very well make the next succession problem harder.
Ruth Umoh
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com