We used to talk about “leading from the front”, now it's about leading from the cloud, or better still, the beach front villa

Starbucks’ new CEO Brian Niccol will not be moving cities to join his new employer in Seattle, but will continue to work from home in Newport Beach, just over 1,000 miles away.? Niccol's compensation package includes a $1.6 million base salary, substantial performance bonuses, equity awards (potentially exceeding $100 million) plus a funky new arrangement that his office will remain his home. He will take the corporate jet when required to attend the Starbucks HQ.

All very modern you might say.? Nothing to see here.??Who would want to work in a major City, with all the hassle that entails? ??The world is flat, the ‘nowhere office’ is the new normal and working from the seaside is the new zeitgeist.? I have argued here before that this new preference for “leading from home” illuminates a particular mindset that serves to aggrandise the individual leader, but not cohere the organisation.? Whatever happened to servant leadership, or Collins’ “Level 5 Leadership” – blending personal humility with determination and visibility?? I fear though that leaders like Niccol, who now dial it in, or comfortably carbon-commute by jet, might be the new normal.

Being apart has never been more popular

It is not just the Fortune 500 CEO’s who have embraced remote working.? Being apart is so popular now, it’s becoming ubiquitous. According to the ONS, 44% of all employees in the UK now work from home and only 7% of CEO's work full-time in the office. Commenting in The FT, Kit Bingham, partner at head-hunter Heidrick & Struggles nails the new paradigm. “The model of a giant central office where everyone needs to be is historic,” he said. “Very regularly in London, I’ll go to a big company HQ, and it’s got six people rattling around.” A vibrant new industry of consultants, thought-leaders, and “Workplace Transformation” gurus has sprung up, wrestling with the new obsession organisations have with “making remote and hybrid work”. ?I struggle to find many others as befuddled as I am about the rapid normalisation of leadership (and collaboration) at distance.? As Ferris Bueller said, ""Life moves pretty fast.?If you don't stop and look around, you could miss it."

Well-being versus Toxic Productivity

Arguing that the close co-location of teams, leaders and different functions aids the pursuit of greater cohesion and productivity is a kind of modern-management heresy.? It is almost as if the debate about working patterns and workplace productivity has become another front in the dismal culture wars.? When leaders like Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and Sir Jim Ratcliffe raise their concerns about collaboration, visibility and productivity, they are pilloried for being dinosaurs.? But by any measure, the last few years has seen the greatest liberalisation in the form, mode and pattern of work in history (and a global work-life re-balance experiment) that has provided no discernible uptick in employee engagement, productivity, or talent retention.?

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, was filmed recently (August 2024) speaking to a class at Stanford University and was asked about Google's poor progress in creating AI – and why, essentially, Google, with all its resources lagged start-up competitors in rolling out AI products and solutions. His answer was brutal, blunt and speaks volumes.

“I am no longer a Google employee, in the spirit of full disclosure, Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the start-ups, the reason start-ups work, is that the people work like hell – and I am sorry to be so blunt. The fact of the matter is, if you all leave the University and found a company, you are not going to let people work from home, and only come in one day a week.”

Today the old paradigm of regular office attendance, in-person collaboration is an anathema – a twenty first century relic, of some past derelict industrial age.? But here is Schmidt arguing that start-ups eat the "work from home" culture for breakfast. He argues close-intense collaboration gives firms an organisational advantage, and that WFH is an innovation inhibitor, as remote and hybrid hinder what he calls "the network effect". His personal view about start-ups tallies with research from Steve Blank at Stanford that found that pre-seed and seed startups with employees showing up in a physical office have 3? times higher revenue growth than those that are solely remote. Schmidt suggests that big companies like Google can afford to meander. His critics respond that he is being “out of touch”, or promoting “toxic productivity"; a tech leader gone rogue, straying into dangerous Musk-like heresy.

Once the remote genie was let out of the box, there was never any real prospect of it being put back.? The tide has turned and many leaders issuing return to office “mandates” and those advocating the value of close in-person collaboration increasingly seem like the King Canute’s of workplace design, gesticulating as the waves approach.

We used to talk about leadership in terms of “leading from the front”, now it is about leading from the cloud, or better still, the beach front villa. But if it is, surely then we need a different kind of leadership. One that reignites the firm, re-engages colleagues, and re-inspires employees. I am hoping Starbuck's shiny new CEO packs all that and more into his flight case.