Stitch Fix shows the limits of the management consultant-to-CEO pipeline
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Michelle Obama talks about her new healthy drink startup, Sha'Carri Richardson defies controversy as the new fastest woman in the world, and Stitch Fix shows the limits of the consultant-to-CEO pipeline.
- Training ground. Do management consultants make good CEOs? The Stitch Fix case study is an argument for "not always," my colleague Phil Wahba explains in a new Fortune story.
Elizabeth Spaulding took over as CEO of the personal styling brand Stitch Fix from founder Katrina Lake in 2021 after a transitional stint as the company's president. A Bain & Company alum, her pedigree impressed investors and analysts. But she stepped down at the beginning of this year with the e-commerce business in dire straits; Stitch Fix's stock price had fallen 93% over Spaulding's tenure and the company made several rounds of layoffs. Spaulding exited the business, and Lake returned to try her hand at saving the company until it found a permanent CEO.
Analysts ultimately concluded that Spaulding had an impressive tech background, but lacked on-the-ground apparel industry experience that would have helped with parts of the job, including inventory. Typical consulting cost-saving solutions—like reducing the flexibility afforded to Stitch Fix's stylists—ended up backfiring. Spaulding didn't respond to a request for comment for this story.
While many factors were at play in the fate of Stitch Fix, Spaulding's tenure is a recent example of what can happen when executives go straight from consulting to the corner office. As Joel Bines, a retired managing director at AlixPartners, told Phil: “There is nothing about management consulting that prepares anyone to be a CEO of anything."
Consulting alumni are eyed by headhunters for the ability to see patterns, problems, and solutions from a bird's-eye view. Years at firms like McKinsey, Bain, and Accenture can be like "B-school on steroids," Phil writes.
But the lessons learned in consulting don't cover everything. So a more typical path than jumping straight to CEO is when high-level consultants make an operational pit stop before claiming a top job. In the Fortune 500, 47 CEOs have management consultancies on their résumés, but only three arrived in the C-suite straight from those firms—and none went straight to CEO.
Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser is one such CEO who followed that path. She was a McKinsey partner focused on finance before moving to Citi in 2004 and climbing the ladder at the bank. She became CEO in 2021.
Read Phil's full analysis here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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