Stephanie Linnartz’s big bet as Under Armour CEO backfires
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Two women executives are launching Be a Breadwinner to help women achieve their financial goals, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati talks about the company's new video generation platform, and Fortune senior writer Maria Aspan reports on the sudden departure of Under Armour CEO Stephanie Linnartz. Have a terrific Thursday.
- Abrupt endings. CEO Stephanie Linnartz thought she had three years to turn around Under Armour. Instead, she’s leaving after just one year.
Under Armour, the long-struggling sportswear company still controlled by founder Kevin Plank, on Wednesday said that Plank would replace Linnartz as CEO, effective April 1. Plank will become Under Armour’s fourth CEO in four years after he initially “stepped down” from the role in 2020. (He has remained executive chairman since then, and still owns 65% of Under Armour’s voting shares.)
It’s a shocking departure for Linnartz, a well-respected executive who was previously No. 2 at Marriott International—and yet it’s also not surprising. Linnartz knew that she was taking a big gamble on a turnaround job at Under Armour, as she told me last summer for a Fortune profile.
“I believe in taking calculated risks,” she told me then. “I don’t believe in being reckless.”
But it was obvious, even early into Linnartz’s tenure, that Plank didn’t want to give up control of the company he founded in 1996. (I knew it was a bad sign when he declined multiple requests to get on the phone with me for that article, for a quick interview about his new CEO.) And Linnartz had a lot to fix, most of which Plank was ultimately responsible for: slowing growth, a plummeting share price, a faded “second-tier” brand, and a founder who couldn’t stop generating controversy. As I wrote in October:
Recent years have given us several examples of ambitious, experienced executives—often women—who take on a CEO job that involves working for a predecessor or founder, and trying to keep him happy while fixing some of the problems he created.
...Everyone has a boss to keep happy—even ridiculously well-compensated CEOs—and the vagaries of working for the guy you’re supposedly replacing aren’t always gendered. But it’s striking how many ambitious women, still, have to take such risks in order to get a shot at the top spot in corporate America, where women account for barely 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs. The career choices made by [former Walgreens CEO Roz] Brewer, [current X CEO Linda] Yaccarino, and potentially Linnartz also raise questions about how much executives still have to navigate the “glass cliff,” the data-backed phenomenon in which women have to accept riskier opportunities in order to advance.
Women CEOs already have shorter tenures than men, as my colleague Lila MacLellan recently reported, and replacing a male founder seems particularly fraught. Last month, Nextdoor said that cofounder Nirav Tolia will replace CEO Sarah Friar. This week, Linnartz’s abrupt departure from Under Armour gives us another bleak data point.
Read my full story about Linnartz’s departure from Under Armour here and my original profile of her here.
Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan
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