Why are the big companies CEO's coming back?

I recently read a few articles in the new edition of "Conde Nast Portfolio." I noticed a theme throughout the magazine and it looks like this is occurring throughout the industry. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz makes a comeback and Dell CEO Michael Dell also returns.

Why are these CEO's returning? It seems that their babies (their businesses they built and labored over) are failing since they left. Why would this occur? I was speaking to a friend of mine regarding this issue and realized why this might be occurring.

When you build a business from scratch, you have an idea and a desire to bring that idea into fruition. When you hire a CEO to run your business, he is thinking of it like an employee would. An employee shows up to work, clocks in, does enough work to say they did the job and then go home.

When you are a business owner, you slave to get the business going. You work every day and even nights to make your business a success. Why do business owners do this? Because we know that success is graded by your ROI (Return on investment). After all, why would you slave over a business that is not giving you and your shareholders a nice return on your investment?

I am glad to see Howard Schultz and Michael Dell coming back to fix their businesses. I am looking forward to the new Italian drinks that Howard Schultz will be offering through his Starbucks coffee shops and I also hope that Michael Dell keeps the same quality and pricing that I love about Dell products.

I guess the bottom line is that you can create a desire in your employees to complete tasks but you can't create a desire in your employees to help you build the business. Unless your employees own a part of your business and are able to share in the successes and the failures, they will never do as good a job as you did running the business. I wish this weren't true but all signs point to this being the reason that you need to run your business.

I am curious though, if we will be seeing Microsoft's "Bill Gates" coming back in a year or so?