Is History Repeating Itself at Herbalife?
In 1980, Mark Hughes began selling nutritional products from the trunk of his car in Los Angeles. Twenty years later, the company he founded had become a global enterprise generating more than $1 billion in annual sales.
Hughes was an unusual entrepreneur: salesman, evangelist and relentless advocate for the company he created. When Herbalife and the direct-selling industry came under scrutiny, he defended the business publicly, including an appearance before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1985. But Hughes’ greatest contribution was not a product or a compensation plan. It was the clarity of the mission behind them: to change people’s lives.
That mission created something more powerful than a conventional sales organization. It created a global community of independent distributors who identified personally with the products, the opportunity and the company. When Hughes died unexpectedly in 2000 at only 44, Herbalife therefore lost more than its founder. It lost the person who embodied its purpose and direction.
The years that followed were uncertain. Leadership changed, the company searched for direction and, in 2002, Herbalife was acquired by private equity investors. The products remained. The distributors remained. The infrastructure and global brand remained. What Herbalife needed was a new North Star.
A New Era
The answer began to emerge in 2003 with the arrival of Michael O. Johnson.
Johnson came from The Walt Disney Company, where he had spent 17 years and most recently served as President of Walt Disney International. He was not a direct-selling executive. He was a brand builder who understood aspiration, identity and community. That distinction mattered.
Johnson did not try to become Mark Hughes. Instead, he embraced what Hughes had built, respected the company’s distributors and set out to create a vision for what Herbalife could become. He brought ambition, brand thinking, product focus, energy and an unusual ability to connect with the field. But he also understood that vision alone was insufficient.
That complementary capability arrived in Gregory Probert, another seasoned Disney executive whose background was markedly different: financial, analytical and operational. Probert joined Herbalife in 2003 as Chief Operating Officer and later became President and COO.
The two executives had very different strengths. Michael was the visionary; Greg was the operator. One established direction and created belief. The other translated that direction into operating discipline and execution.
This distinction matters because Herbalife’s history suggests that its periods of greatest strength were not defined simply by who occupied the CEO’s office. They were defined by whether vision and execution existed together.
Vision without execution becomes aspiration. Execution without vision becomes administration.
Herbalife had both, and the business accelerated.
The partnership did not last. Probert resigned in 2008 after acknowledging that he had not completed the MBA requirements previously stated in his corporate biography. Herbalife continued to grow under Johnson, who remained one of the most consequential leaders in the company’s history. But the Johnson-Probert partnership had demonstrated something worth remembering: transformational businesses are rarely built around one person’s capabilities. They are built around complementary capabilities working together.
Johnson eventually attempted to step away from the CEO position, more than once. And more than once, Herbalife eventually turned back to him. Today, he serves as Executive Chairman and Chairman of the Board.
Herbalife now faces another leadership transition. Stephan Gratziani, who became CEO in May 2025, is scheduled to leave the position at the end of October 2026. CFO John DeSimone will become interim CEO while the board searches for a successor.
The natural question is who should become the next CEO. Herbalife’s history suggests there is a more important question to answer first: What does a successful Herbalife look like ten years from now?
Until that is defined, choosing a CEO means selecting a person before fully defining the enterprise that person is expected to build.
Preserve the DNA. Reinvent the Enterprise.
Herbalife is not an ordinary consumer-products company. Its distributors are not simply a sales channel between the company and its customers. They introduce products, educate customers, build relationships, create communities, develop other distributors and transmit Herbalife’s culture from one generation to another. They are the circulatory system of the enterprise.
Mark Hughes understood that. Michael Johnson understood it. The next CEO must understand it too.
But understanding Herbalife’s past cannot mean recreating it. The commercial environment in which Hughes founded Herbalife no longer exists, nor does the environment in which Johnson and Probert scaled it. The fundamental human needs Herbalife serves have not disappeared: people still want better health, additional income, belonging, recognition and greater control over their lives. What has changed is how they expect those needs to be served.
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Customers increasingly expect simple digital experiences, transparency, personalization and immediacy. Social platforms allow individuals to build communities at extraordinary scale. Creators have become businesses. Technology increasingly allows health and wellness companies to personalize products, coaching and customer relationships.
For Herbalife, these changes are particularly important because technology need not disintermediate the distributor. It can empower the distributor. The distributor of the future should have vastly better tools to acquire and understand customers, build communities, personalize engagement and operate a business than Mark Hughes could possibly have imagined in 1980.
The opportunity, therefore, is not to abandon Herbalife’s model. It is to modernize the model around the people who make it work.
That requires leadership capable of doing two seemingly contradictory things simultaneously: preserving the DNA of Herbalife while being willing to redesign the enterprise around it. And that is where institutional memory becomes both an extraordinary asset and a potential constraint.
Herbalife possesses decades of knowledge about its markets, products and distributor community. That knowledge should be protected. But institutional memory cannot be allowed to define the future on its own. The greatest danger facing mature companies is rarely that experienced people suddenly become incompetent. It is that yesterday’s experience quietly becomes tomorrow’s assumption.
A company can execute an obsolete model exceptionally well and still lose relevance.
The next generation of Herbalife leadership must understand the company’s history without becoming constrained by it. Experience should inform the future, not dictate it.
Define the Future Before Choosing the Leader
Before Herbalife determines who should lead it, the company should define what success looks like.
What does the distributor of 2035 look like? What does the customer experience look like? How should technology strengthen human relationships? How should products, personalization, commerce and community interact? What economics will attract the next generation of distributors? What capabilities must exist inside the company to support them?
Answer those questions and a picture of the future enterprise begins to emerge. From there, Herbalife can determine the operating model required to build it and, only then, the leadership capabilities necessary to execute it.
Define the destination. Design the enterprise. Then choose the people.
That process may reveal another lesson from the Johnson-Probert era: Herbalife does not need a hero CEO.
Michael Johnson did not need to possess every capability. He surrounded himself with executives whose strengths complemented his own. Vision was paired with execution. Brand building was paired with operating discipline. Emotional connection was paired with analytical rigor.
The titles matter less than the architecture.
The next CEO must be capable of setting direction and creating belief, but also sufficiently self-aware to build a leadership team containing people who are better at important things than the CEO is. Herbalife needs vision and operating rigor. It needs respect for institutional knowledge and the willingness to challenge institutional assumptions. It needs an emotional connection with its distributor community and fact-based decision-making inside the enterprise. It needs continuity and reinvention.
Those capabilities may reside in one extraordinary individual. More likely, they will reside in an extraordinary team.
Is History Repeating Itself?
Herbalife once lost its founder and spent years searching for its next chapter. Eventually, it found a leadership architecture that combined vision, belief and operating capability and propelled the company into a new era.
Today, Herbalife faces another generational transition. The company has recently returned to growth after a difficult post-pandemic period. The question now is whether that recovery becomes another operating cycle or the foundation for Herbalife’s next era.
The company can treat the current transition as another CEO search. Or it can treat it as something much more consequential: the design of Herbalife’s future.
Mark Hughes gave Herbalife its mission. Michael Johnson carried the mantle and helped transform that mission into a much larger global enterprise. The next CEO does not need to be another Mark Hughes, nor does the next CEO need to be another Michael Johnson.
Herbalife must first decide where it is going. It must preserve the elements of its culture that remain sources of competitive advantage, challenge assumptions that belong to another era and design an organization capable of succeeding in the market ahead. Then it should choose the leadership team capable of building it.
Perhaps history is repeating itself at Herbalife. If so, the most important lesson from the last transition is not who led the company.
