What happens when a founder won’t leave the new CEO alone (and what to do about it)

Eighteen months after the deal closed, the new chief executive of a midmarket software business told me about his real problem. His executive team were listening to someone else. The founder had stayed on as chair and was exerting what the CEO saw as unhelpful influence: slowing, distracting, and sometimes outright blocking the change investors had brought him in to deliver. In private equity deals involving founder-led firms, the founder is routinely kept on as chair or partner, alongside a...