milesthedog wrote:
DeRue is a heavyweight in the field of organizational behavior, and still actively publishing: https://scholar.google.com/...s&sortby=pubdate I've actually never seen someone in a full professor and dean position go into a CEO role - it actually looks like he was president of Equinox while simultaneously a dean at U of Michigan. Prior to his academic career, he was in private equity, so that experience and his expertise in leadership and high-performing teams looks pretty interesting to me.
"heavyweight" is a big stretch. let's not get carried away here.
this is an oddball hire. he is an academic and my experience is that academics fail miserably in the real world (hence, why they stay in academia). it looks like he dabbled in consulting for a few years after getting his phd and has been in academia since 2007. his private equity work looks like nothing more than a side hustle a lot of professors do to make more money. it's not like he was a partner at apollo or kkr. he stepped down from his academic jobs in 2021 to take the president job at equinox. i am very curious how equinox has done in the last 3 years (i have heard that they have bounced back well from the covid closures but i don't know if that's right). i belonged to equinox for nearly 20 years (i quit in 2019 after an enormous monthly increase even though i only used the gyms sporadically and belong to another better gym) and they had a great product but had expanded too much. he comes across as a self-promoter who brags about things that people in the know know are not that impressive but those types tend to have success in life (at least initially).
i do think that IM is a mess so an outsidef-the-box hire might be what is needed to fix things. i wish him well and hope and he can right the ship because it needs righting.