There is perhaps nothing that unites the foot soldiers of capitalism like the universally agitating experience of commuting: sitting in traffic for hours; getting sweaty on (often-delayed) subways; suffering through mediocre bike lanes and threats of congestion pricing.
Brian Niccol, the newly minted chief executive of Starbucks, has found a personal solution: a 1,000-mile commute from his home in Newport Beach, Calif., to the company’s headquarters in Seattle, on Starbucks’ corporate plane.
Mr. Niccol is the latest of the American supercommuting chief executives, a trend that has been on the rise since the turn of the millennium but has found increased attention since the coronavirus pandemic thrust remote work into the mainstream. Starbucks’ concessions to Mr. Niccol also underscore just how much companies are willing to bend in order to woo big-time executives — and how much leeway they have to do so, as corporate culture continues to adjust to post-pandemic norms.
The details of Mr. Niccol’s employment terms became public after Starbucks filed his offer letter and contract with the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to his contract, he will be offered use of the company’s corporate jet to commute to Seattle, and will be provided housing and transportation for three months, or until he secures a secondary residence in Washington State.
Mr. Niccol, who left his job as chief executive of the Chipotle restaurant franchise for his new position, was highly sought by Starbucks, which has struggled for years to compete in the specialty coffee market it once had largely to itself. Mr. Niccol’s sudden hire this month prompted an immediate 25 percent surge in Starbucks’s stock price — a gain of $20 billion in market value.
Stacked against the occasional cost of a corporate jet flight, the trade-off is one that large companies like Starbucks are increasingly willing to make, especially for executives who can so quickly provide value. Last week, Victoria’s Secret announced it had poached Hillary Super from Rihanna’s lingerie company, Savage X Fenty, and that she would remain at the company’s New York office rather than relocate to its headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.
That announcement, too, immediately buoyed Victoria’s Secret stock prices. According to Ms. Super’s contract, she, too, will commute to Ohio regularly on the company’s dime.
“Remote work for C.E.O.s is one of the tools you can use to recruit a new C.E.O. who might not be willing to relocate to the company’s headquarters,” said Denis Sosyura, a professor of finance at Arizona State University who studies corporate governance. “If you have a C.E.O. who really likes living in Southern California, it’s very difficult to recruit them away.”
Many executives of large companies have always been on the road regularly, and relocations to corporate headquarters have often been more performative than practical. Among other high-profile examples that have been widely reported is Charles Scharf, who took over a troubled Wells Fargo in 2019 and did so from New York, commuting regularly to the bank’s San Francisco headquarters. Lidiane Jones runs the online dating empire Bumble — whose headquarters are in Austin, Texas — from her home in Cambridge, Mass.
According to a prepandemic study on remote executives conducted by Mr. Sosyura and Ran Duchin, a finance professor at Boston College, more than 17 percent of public companies sampled employed a remote chief executive at some point.
The effectiveness of such arrangements is mixed, and there is little data available that accounts for the differences between pre- and post-pandemic office culture. Companies with a remote chief executive were found to fare worse than those with place-based executives, and saw a decrease in valuation and productivity. In more human terms, long-distance chief executives had lower approval ratings from employees.
And, as companies increasingly seek to promote sustainability and environmentally conscious business practices, costly endeavors like private jet travel can undercut such efforts.
“Consumers seem to care about these things more these days than before. You’re buying a narrative. You’re not just buying the coffee,” said Mr. Duchin. “This is an implicit stand on issues like sustainability.”
David Calhoun, who took over as Boeing’s chief executive in 2019, faced criticism over his remote work habits, especially as the company faced a crisis over problems with its 787 Dreamliner aircraft and fallout over fatal crashes of its 737 Max airplanes.
Mr. Calhoun, who never relocated to the company’s headquarters, commuted via private jet. He stepped down this month.
Such arrangements have sparked new interest in the post-pandemic corporate world, where companies are increasingly abandoning remote work and requiring employees to regularly work from the office.
Whether Mr. Niccol’s arrangement will mark a top-down shift for the rest of the company remains to be seen. Starbucks, like many companies, announced early last year that it would shift to a hybrid working model and require its corporate employees to work from the office at least three days a week.
“It’s sort of a little bit too early to tell, especially since it’s been just a year or two since we’ve gotten to business as usual,” Mr. Sosyura said. “There is certainly a trend of it becoming more acceptable. We’re in a new equilibrium.”
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