When a founding generation leader cannot complete their own departure from a firm or institution, the standard explanation is that they won't let go — implying a failure of will or generosity, something that could be corrected if the person simply decided to do things differently. This explanation is not usually wrong about the behavior, but it is wrong about what is generating it.
For founders and long-tenured senior leaders, the firm is rarely just a place of work. It is, in a meaningful psychological sense, an extension of the self — built from their values, shaped by their choices, populated with relationships that formed around their authority. Elliott Jaques observed that the most successful founders are often those for whom the boundary between self and firm becomes genuinely difficult to locate. The firm thinks the way they think. Their identity is organized in part around what the firm represents.
This fusion is productive during the building phase. It generates the commitment and personal investment that grows an institution. The problem is that what was an asset during building becomes an obstacle during transition. A departure requires the founder to experience themselves as separate from the firm — which requires the firm to be able to exist, and to exist well, in their absence. That is a threat not just to their role but to a particular organization of self that has been stable for decades.
The behavioral consequence is a departure that keeps not quite completing. Formal titles change. Decision rights are nominally transferred. And then the informal authority persists — in the calls that still route to the founder, the decisions that wait for their input, the culture that still reads them as the real authority. Everyone in the firm is aware of this. It is rarely named directly.
What changes the situation is not a more explicit succession plan, although clarity about formal authority transfer matters. What changes it is the founder's ability to develop a different relationship to the firm — one in which their identity is not contingent on their continued centrality. That requires engaging with the developmental question that Levinson identified as central to late adulthood: what does the person want to have built, contributed, left behind — independent of whether they are still the one running it? That question is harder than it sounds, and it cannot be answered from inside the role.