Leonard Riggio, founder of the New York-based Barnes & Noble retail empire, is expected to step down as ceo today and name, as his replacement, his brother, Stephen Riggio. He will retain his position as chairman of the board.
The 60-year-old entrepreneur said he would remain an active chairman and oversee any mergers and acquisitions activity, but would relinquish all of the day-to-day operational matters. He told The New York Times that he wants to spend more time in the worlds of politics (liberal), art-collecting (modern) and publishing (writing).
Stephen Riggio, 47, is currently vice chairman, and has been working for the bookstore chain for 33 years. He has also been acting ceo of BarnesandNoble.com, the company's Internet spinoff, that was trading publicly at $1.56 a share yesterday. (The stock price once stood as high as $20 a share, shortly after its initial public offering in 1999.) Bertelsmann, Barnes & Noble's partner in the venture, took steps to prevent Stephen Riggio's appointment as permanent ceo out of a concern with his lack of experience.
The nine-member Barnes & Noble board, including five outside directors, has unanimously approved of Stephen Riggio's promotion. But The Times pointed out that the Securities & Exchange Commission might be less sanguine. The fact that Leonard Riggio is the company's largest stockholder, his successor is his brother and the board approved the appointment without conducting a search or forming a search committee might raise conflict-of-interest charges.
As part of the management transition, Mitchell Klipper, now president of the division responsible for opening new stores, will become coo.
Leonard Riggio started it all in 1965 by dropping out of New York University and buying a campus bookstore that sold discounted textbooks to NYU students. Thirty years later, he had conceptualized the idea of book (and music) superstores. The company now owns and operates about 570 superstores under the Barnes & Noble, Bookstop and Bookstar banners and about 340 B. Dalton, Doubleday and Scribner's bookstores in malls. Through its GameStop subsidiary, it owns another 1000 video-game stores under the Babbage's Etc., Software Etc., GameStop and FuncoLand nameplates.