Lululemon’s Chip Wilson is giving the company a severe case of ‘post-founder syndrome’

In today’s CEO Daily: Phil Wahba on Chip Wilson’s fight with the athleisure company he founded

The big leadership story: Trump’s dealmaking strategy hits a wall in Hormuz

The markets: Mixed performance across Asia with S&P 500 futures trending slightly down

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Good morning. Phil Wahba writing this morning from New York. What’s a company to do when the founder has left—but hasn’t moved on? That’s the plight Lululemon, which reports earnings today after the bell today, finds itself in more than a decade after founder Chip Wilson departed its board. Though his methods have varied—full page newspaper ads berating the board, LinkedIn posts criticizing strategy, open letters to shareholders—Wilson has been adamant that leadership is doing just about everything wrong. I delve into the drama in my latest feature for Fortune. But the question I explore is one familiar to any company with a charismatic and dogged leader who sees the company they founded fumble—and can’t stay away. 

There’s even a name for it, “post-founder syndrome,” in which executives who built highly successful companies criticize successors’ perceived stumbles with an “only I can do this properly” attitude. (See: the founders of Starbucks, Papa John’s Pizza, and Nike.) In his Wall Street Journal ad last autumn, Wilson delivered a rather self-aggrandizing disquisition on why Lululemon had drifted: “A company bereft of a visionary loses its singular voice for product and long term strategy,”........

© Fortune