Cowen Partners President Shawn Cole Authors Boardroom Pulse Op-Ed on Nike’s Succession Lesson
Shawn Cole, President and Co-Founder of Cowen Partners Executive Search, published a new op-ed in governance publication Boardroom Pulse examining what Nike’s decision to bring back a retired insider as CEO really says about the state of its leadership bench.
In the piece, “Nike’s Boomerang CEO: Why a Workplace Reckoning is Proof of an Empty Succession Bench,” Shawn works through a governance question most of the headlines skipped.
When Elliott Hill returned in October 2024 after more than three decades at Nike and four years in retirement, investors and employees largely welcomed him. But as Shawn frames it, a board reaching four years into retirement for its next CEO isn’t succession planning working as intended. It’s a sign the current bench failed to produce an obvious choice.
His analysis traces how a company once celebrated as one of corporate America’s great leadership factories ended up looking backward. He connects it to Nike’s 2018 cultural reckoning, when a wave of senior departures followed a workplace-conduct investigation.
Shawn is careful to hold two ideas at once:
- The accountability was necessary.
- Boards should never protect a succession plan by overlooking misconduct, but that reckoning also quietly hollowed out the layer of executives Nike would ordinarily have been developing into future CEOs.
Accountability and succession, he writes, are not the same exercise.
The governance lesson he draws is the part directors should sit with. One presumed successor has never been a succession plan; it’s optimism dressed as preparation.
Effective succession creates genuine choice, several credible leaders developed and tested long before the board needs to decide, and that discipline matters most immediately after a crisis, precisely when the bench looks thinnest. Because a company only learns what a cultural crisis truly costs when it runs out of internal options and has to look backward.
Read Shawn Cole’s full op-ed in Boardroom Pulse.
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