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Jan 3, 2025

CEOs Are Leaving Their Jobs (or Delegating Others to Do So)

What’s causing the exec-odus?

By Ed Goldman

Are you a distraught male CEO—despondent, even? Have you been issuing somewhat ambiguous missives to your management team implying you may or may not be on the verge of taking your own job and telling you to shove it? 

Join the crowd. According to a story in multiple editions of American City Business Journals, more CEOs have been leaving their jobs than ever before. Well, than in the past two decades, anyway. There must have been a run on golden parachutes at REI.

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The story was written by Andy Medici—who, with that surname, must have caused the “23andMe” website to spontaneously detonate, leaving little genealogical shards scattered all over cyberspace. 

By the end of 2024, about 1,250 Big Bosses had left their C-suites, which was about 13 percent more than those who did so in 2023. The source of the numbers was a job-coaching business with the colorful name of Challenger, Gray and Christmas—apparently named to honor, respectively, a tragically failed space shuttle, the given name of the only California governor in history who lost a recall movement and a holiday whose 2025 shopping season begins next week.

Various reasons have been cited for the diaspora of dilettantes, including both forms of Artificial Intelligence: (1) the uppercase version, meaning many of their jobs seemed superfluous with the advent of machines that could, with minimal input, write mediocre memoranda on their own; and (2) the lowercase kind, meaning the CEOs’ seeming brilliance was finally recognized by their boards of directors as basically, baloney with some skin left on.

So we now have self-deposed captains of industry wandering the streets of gated communities, their eyes as vacant as their former over-decorated offices, their pockets poignantly stuffed with 12-figure severance checks. 

Well, we here at the Goldman State, now just three days into our sixth year as an unintentional nonprofit (but without any workplace injuries), are nothing if not empathetic. (And I mean nothing.) So I had our inhouse can-do life coach, Hugh Betcha, come up with a short list of coping mechanisms for ex-execs’ exodus:

  1. LEARN A LANGUAGE. Having spent time with many of you —and heard you say things like “Him and her make a good team”—Hugh suggests enrolling in our EFL program (English As a First Language). Imagine having your gardener and cleaning people understand you the first time you say it.
  2. CHANGE YOUR GENDER. If you were a male CEO, learn what it was like for the female ones to try to crash the glass ceiling you kept perpetually Windex’d at the office to lure them into thinking they’d ever have a chance to advance. And if you’ve been a female CEO, why not experience firsthand the male banter you were always left out of, just to confirm you weren’t exactly missing Mensa seminars:

MALE CEO #1: Did you see what the feds are going to do about—

MALE CEO #2—Oh, yeah, about the—

MALE CEO #3: Who ordered the ahi poke?

MALE CEO #1: I think that’s mine.

MALE CEO #2: Right. I ordered the Caesar with extra ancho–

MALE CEO #3: Anchovies, yeah. You really like those?

MALE CEO #1: Well, why would he’ve ordered them if–

MALE CEO #2: Yeah. Look, getting back to the feds and–

MALE CEO #3: The thing?

MALE CEO #1 and MALE CEO #2: Yeah. The you know.

  1. DEVELOP A HOBBY OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE. Look, you’ve played enough golf over the years to warrant your own gold-encrusted tiny pencil. Do something unexpected, like: (a) Whittling peach-pits into baskets; (b) Creating mnemonic devices so you can remember your grandchildren’s ages and names; (c) Creating mnemonic devices so you can remember your children’sages and names; (d) Creating mnemonic devices so you can remember your wife’s name but nother age. Unless she’s your third wife, is 27 and gave up a promising career at Hooters when you proposed.
  2. BECOME A BOXER. It’ll get you in shape and who knows? One day you may even become a cashier!—Oh, did you think Hugh meant you should become a professional pugilist? Come on, you’re still a CEO at heart. You have people to do that for you.

Don’t forget! A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).