CEO Carousel: When Leadership Expires Faster Than Milk

Mattel and General Mills just made their moves. Roger Lynch takes over at Mattel on September 30. Dana McNabb steps into General Mills on January 1, 2027. Neither announcement landed like breaking news because we've stopped being surprised when C-suite chairs spin.

Retail is having a full meltdown. Forty-one CEO exits year-to-date in 2025—that's a 116 percent jump from nineteen the year before. The trend isn't confined to one sector either. Consumer goods companies worldwide saw 54 CEO departures in 2025, the most since tracking began in 2018. Walmart, Nestle, Kroger—the names that define American commerce are cycling through leadership like a revolving door.

Here's the uncomfortable part: it's getting worse. Average CEO tenure has collapsed to 4.8 years from 7.5 years a decade ago. In 2026 alone, 77 new CEOs were appointed in Q1, the highest first-quarter total in at least eight years. The math is brutal. By the time a CEO understands the actual business, they're already updating LinkedIn.

Greg Foran arrived at Kroger in February 2026 and watched four senior executives exit within months. That's not a coincidence. That's a symptom. The role has become genuinely impossible—leaders are juggling tariff policy, AI transformation, consumer spending that won't cooperate, and a board that's increasingly impatient. Nobody stays long enough to fix anything because the problems are too sprawling and the window to show results got shorter.

The pipeline problem makes it worse. Sixty-five percent of C-suite and next-generation consumer leaders aren't interested in being CEO at all. Boards are scraping the bottom of a shallower bench than they realize, which means they're promoting people who might not actually want the job but need the title.

When your company's top job feels more temporary than a seasonal hire, that's not disruption. That's instability masquerading as evolution. Your business doesn't need another new CEO. It needs one who gets to stay long enough to matter.