Whenever a major publicly traded company loses its CEO, the board convenes, an executive search firm gets retained and the net is cast wide — internally and externally, the press release always says — and a few months later, a polished outsider arrives with fresh energy, a mandate for change and very little idea of what actually makes the place tick.
MillerKnoll is at that crossroads right now. With Andi Owen retiring effective June 30 and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Stutz stepping in as Interim CEO while the board conducts a permanent search, the company has a genuine choice to make. It can follow the typical script. Or it can resist the gravitational pull of convention and do something smarter: look inward.
I’d like to make the case for the latter.
MillerKnoll is not a generic enterprise. It is not a holding company or a logistics platform or a financial services firm where a skilled executive can parachute in, absorb a few briefing documents, and be up to speed by Q2. It is a company whose identity is inseparable from its history, its design philosophy, its culture and the extraordinarily complex web of brand relationships it has been building for decades. Herman Miller. Knoll. Design Within Reach. HAY. Each of those names carries weight in the design and contract interiors world that no outsider can fully appreciate until they’ve spent years at Main Site and the Design Yard in West Michigan.
That’s not a knock on the talent pool outside MillerKnoll’s walls. There are exceptional executives out there. But exceptional general management skills are not the same thing as genuine fluency with what these brands mean to the trade, design community, dealers and A&D firms and corporate specifiers who have built long-term relationships with these products and the people behind them. That fluency takes time. It is earned through years of internal debate about what the brands stand for, through hard conversations with dealers, through understanding why a certain product decision would land badly with the Herman Miller faithful even if the numbers looked fine on paper.
The search firm won’t tell you that. It will give you a candidate who is smart and credentialed and has managed large organizations. It will not give you someone who already knows where the bodies are buried, who the key relationships are, what the culture actually rewards versus what it says it rewards. That knowledge only lives inside the building.
If the board is serious about finding an internal candidate, it need not look far. Jeff Stutz has been part of this organization for more than 25 years, joining Herman Miller in 2001, serving as Chief Financial Officer for over a decade, and stepping into the Chief Operating Officer role in September 2025, overseeing the International Contract segment and global manufacturing operations. That breadth of experience across finance and operations gives him a view of the company that few executives anywhere possess. He knows the balance sheet and he knows the factory floor. He knows the brands.
I asked current Herman Miller employees about him. And by all accounts, he is well-liked and respected by the people who work alongside him which, as I’ve argued, matters enormously right now. In his own words upon taking the interim role, he spoke of having developed “both an affinity for and admiration of our iconic brands, deep customer and dealer relationships.”
There is also the question of trust and specifically, the trust of the people who actually make MillerKnoll run. Leadership transitions are unsettling for workforces even when they are handled gracefully, as this one appears to have been. The board has signaled operational continuity, reiterating that fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter results are expected to align with prior guidance. That steadiness is real, though fragile. Introducing a leader who is unknown to the organization, who must spend the first year learning the landscape while employees are simultaneously trying to read them, is a risk that often gets underweighted in CEO searches. The intangibles of credibility and familiarity matter. A leader the workforce already knows, already respects and already has a working relationship with can move faster and more decisively from day one than any external hire, no matter how impressive their track record.
This industry — contract interiors, workplace design, the broader ecosystem of the built environment — also has its own rhythms, relationships and vocabulary. The dealer network is not just a distribution channel; it is a community with memory and loyalty and grievance, often all three at once. The A&D relationship is nuanced and sometimes fragile. Understanding all of that at a working level, not just a conceptual one, is genuinely valuable in a CEO. It shapes how they communicate, who they prioritize, which decisions they make instinctively versus which ones they get wrong because they missed the cultural context.
MillerKnoll’s board has said the search will consider both internal and external candidates. Good. That’s the right thing to say. But saying it and genuinely weighting it are two different things. Search processes develop their own momentum. External candidates often shine in formal interview settings in ways that internal ones who are too busy actually running the company to perfect their pitch sometimes don’t. Boards can mistake polish for depth.
The right move here is to look hard at what MillerKnoll actually needs at this moment: not transformation for transformation’s sake, not a headline hire, but steady, credible, culturally grounded leadership from someone who has earned the trust of the organization over years of close contact with it.
The answer to that question is almost certainly already inside the building. The board should make sure it’s looking there first and looking seriously.