Northwest Arkansas: 622,177

St. Louis, MO: 2,814,421

Boston, MA: 5,034,221

The Northwest Arkansas metropolitan area is 4.5x smaller than the St. Louis metropolitan area and 8x smaller than the Boston metropolitan area.

St. Louis held onto Panera Bread Company (founded in 1987 as “St. Louis Bread Company” or as locals refer to it “Bread Co.”) for 40 years. Last month, Paul Carbone, Panera’s recently installed CEO, announced a move of the company’s headquarters to Boston by July 2027.

Bentonville, five hours southwest in neighboring Arkansas, has kept Walmart’s HQ since the 1970s, with no signs of impending abandonment.

What gives?

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Panera announced Mr. Carbone as the new CEO in March 2025 after he’d spent two months as interim CEO. Prior to assuming the top job, he’d been Panera’s CFO since August 2023. A Massachusetts native and former CFO of Dunkin’ Brands, Mr. Carbone worked primarily out of the Newton, MA corporate support center.

Likewise, many other Panera C-suite executives appeared to live and work in cities other than St. Louis: Miami, Atlanta, more Boston.

Like many large corporations, the chief executives of Panera are highly compensated, mobile, and remote (or at least hybrid) relative to the official headquarters in the St. Louis metro area.

But the rest of Panera’s non-restaurant employees? Primarily St. Louis. Over 650 of them. More live elsewhere and work remote. Many of them now face a choice: relocate to Boston or take voluntary severance?

For most, moving comes with a 10% salary increase. For some, an additional relocation allowance up to $50,000. For all, an insanely higher cost of living. According to NerdWallet (who uses cost of living data from the Council for Community and Economic Research), living in Boston is 66% more expensive than in St. Louis. (Housing alone is 178% higher!)

So why move HQ from its traditional home of St. Louis for the Boston area?

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Before moving on further, I need to confess something:

I’m not an unbiased observer. I want to understand Panera’s move, but I’m not Mr. Spock, largely keeping my emotions in check and operating by pure logic.

As a Peoria area native, I’m heavily influenced by April 19, 2017, the day Caterpillar announced it’d be moving of its global headquarters from Peoria to Chicago. (Technically, CAT moved to Deerfield, IL, a northern suburb of Chicago. Like how I say Panera is moving to Boston from St. Louis when the firm is technically moving HQ from Fenton, MO to Weston, MA, I often refer to the metropolitan area.)

CAT’s official reason? To be closer to a major airport: O’Hare.

(Side note. O’Hare will get you more places. Correct. But the TSA line at the Peoria International Airport is nonexistent. You never need pre-check. And it takes less than half-an-hour of in-air flight to get to Chicago. Plus, parking in Peoria is free! Take that, O’Hare.)

No one in my family worked for CAT. My parents taught college business at Bradley University, so many of their students took jobs there after graduation. And many, many of my friends, classmates, and neighbors had parents who worked for CAT, either on the corporate side or at one of the two factories in the Peoria area. Nearly everyone in the area had some connection to the company; CAT’s employees supported all the local service jobs: teachers at schools, doctors and nurses at the three Peoria hospitals, owners and servers at any area restaurant. (Peoria is a company town, and CAT served as an employment multiplier.)

CAT expected 100 employees to relocate from Peoria to Chicago, eventually having 300 in the new Deerfield HQ with most remaining in Central Illinois.

As it’s been nearly a decade since that announcement, how has it played out? It’s a slow trickle away. Many CAT employees remain in Peoria, but look at the CAT job board. What types of jobs can you get and where? Nashville is a popular location. But also, Irving, TX? Oh right. CAT later moved its global HQ again in 2022. The trip to O’Hare must have been taking too long. A drive from the new-new-HQ to DFW now takes half the time (saving 10 minutes each way)!

If we check back in another ten years, I wonder how many CAT employees will remain in Peoria, whether or not the plants will still be in Mossville and East Peoria, and if CAT’s latest headquarters will simply be in an airport. With the current price of jet fuel, some airport somewhere may consolidate flights further and think “Becoming a landlord is a valuable use of Terminal 4, right? (It’s a prime location right next to Cinnabon!)”

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Less speculation about Cinnabon-adjacent headquarters. More facts about Panera Bread Co.

What justification has Panera given for its move to Boston?

According to Paul Carbone, "We understand this [moving to Boston] is a significant change, but one that is necessary to drive forward our RISE strategy that will lead us into the future."

And what exactly is Panera’s RISE strategy? See below.

What does RISE mean operationally? It’s a menu with new additions (plus the removal of iceberg lettuce in favor of OG romaine), the addition of a “Guest Experience Champion" to improve the front-of-house greeting, and an overall focus on the experience. After years of declining sales related to fewer patrons entering, not necessarily due to patrons ordering less food or choosing lower cost options, Panera needed to make some changes, certainly. (Being a firm privately held by the European conglomerate JAB Holding with attempted public offerings in 2021 and 2023 only adds to the financial turnaround pressure. Similar pressure would exist for a public firm.)

Carbone also noted moving most corporate employees from St. Louis to Boston would allow for “deeper collaboration, faster decision-making, and a more unified culture.” Plenty of people debate the merits of in person work vs. remote or hybrid work. But for the most part, Panera has already answered that question: employees are mainly in person. If Panera wanted everyone in person to improve collaboration, decision-making, and culture, then the company could require its remote workers to move to St. Louis, not Boston.

Carbone and other high level executives may have remained hybrid or remote from most employees, like the executives of Caterpillar currently do relative to most Peoria-based employees. Or, if they felt having all employees (including C-suite executives) in one place would make a large change, they all could also move to St. Louis full time.

The primary question Panera faced when deciding who should move is this: Will the gains of moving all corporate employees outweigh the losses? (Because there are always tradeoffs…)

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Boston has its upsides, don’t get me wrong. (And I’m not only talking about the cannoli at Mike’s in the North End. But those are very good, highly recommend.)

Boston’s more a “hub city” for professionals and executives than is St. Louis. More companies from a variety of industries have their headquarters there. This makes for a nimble, more fluid recruitment market as more executives already live and work in the area. An Executive VP of Strategic Finance could easily move up to become another company’s CFO without asking a spouse to move or uprooting middle school aged kids. Simply put, more candidates are local. Actually finding alpha and hiring the higher quality executive depends on the skill of the firm.

Tradeoff #1? Your current executives also have more opportunities to easily leave for an upward (or lateral) move. In three years, that Executive VP who became your CFO could easily become your competitor’s CEO without ever moving school districts.

Tradeoff #2? Moving most of your corporate employees to Boston from St. Louis to take advantage of the greater web of local executives results in a loss of human capital on the non-executive level. It’s inevitable. The cost of living differences mentioned before are astronomical; a CFO may not personally notice, but the entry level accountant will. Plus, some employees are rooted in St. Louis for more personal reasons: they have extended family living close by, their kids are at a bad age for a disruptive move, they have Cardinals season tickets and just can’t imagine becoming Red Sox fans. Ultimately, many current employees will remain in St. Louis and will look for other jobs. Yes, Boston has enough people Panera will find replacement accountants, financial analysts, and HR representatives (all requiring ongoing higher wages and benefits to reflect Boston’s increased cost of living). But Panera will also lose institutional knowledge when long time employees remain in St. Louis.

Academic research quantifies those tradeoffs: 167 corporations who moved their headquarters demonstrated “little evidence of improved operating performance after headquarters relocation.” A study published in 2026 examined 9,952 public firms across 127 cities and found the headquarters’ specific cities accounted for 1.52% of the total variance in corporate performance. Differences at the firm level (including human capital but also factors such as firm strategy, IP, financial structure, etc.) was the strongest factor driving variation in performance, accounting for 20.34%.

While both statistically significant drivers in a firm’s performance, what’s internal to the firm matters much, much more on average than where HQ is.

But that’s “on average.” Panera has a good argument for moving everyone from St. Louis to Boston if it believes its unique circumstances mean the benefits of existing within a larger network of local executives will outweigh the costs of lost human capital, higher ongoing labor expenditures, and the inevitable disruptions to daily operations while moving and hiring replacement employees.

Perhaps Panera believes such a move is a necessary type of “organizational reset”? Losing current employees and causing day-to-day friction while replacing them may create short term friction, but long term? Historic, suboptimal processes may give way to streamlined operations. Not everything a firm currently does is the correct way to continue from now until forever, and a large move allows for a reset. (But then again, new ways of working may also be inefficient or straight up wrong.)

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Which brings us back to Northwest Arkansas. Population: 622,177.

And to Bentonville, the long-time home of Walmart, Inc.

Sam Walton opened Walton’s 5&10 on the Bentonville square in 1950 (see above), unaware of how his company would grow and grow and grow. Walmart opened its first home office in 1971 before being listed on the NYSE in 1972.

And Walmart has been there ever since, expanding into a 350-acre corporate campus with over 15,000 corporate employees (and countless other employees from key Walmart suppliers close by).

But how? Northwest Arkansas faces more limitations than St. Louis, MO, nevermind Chicago or Boston. Fewer people live in and around Bentonville. Those who do are often connected to Walmart already. And those who don’t? I doubt Bentonville (or the state of Arkansas more generally) organically makes anyone’s list of “Top 100 Places I Dream of Moving To”?

Walmart understands these limitations and succeeds because it finds ways to neutralize them. The company creates a culture of growth, specifically noting: “[Our] people are our greatest competitive advantage. These internal promotions reflect our culture of opportunity and the depth of our leadership bench.” Junior level employees see chances for advancement, to work their way up-the-ladder in a world where job tenure feels shorter and shorter with each passing year. But that’s not to say all employees, at any level, remain at Walmart their entire careers. Some executives depart for good. Others leave for a move upward elsewhere, only to later return to Walmart.

For executives who join from elsewhere, Walmart frequently asks them to move to Arkansas. It brings the executives to the institution, not the other way around. Some choose not to accept, either when initially approached about a job or when their role can no longer be fully remote. Being a Fortune 100 company with dwarf planet level gravitational pull, an advantage newer or smaller firms lack, certainly helps in recruiting at all levels, but some friction due to location remains. It just does not outweigh the other benefits to remaining in Bentonville: preserved institutional knowledge, lower labor costs, maintaining an ecosystem decades in the making.

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A majority of firms on the 2026 Fortune 500 list congregate together. But a good sized minority choose to remain elsewhere. Headquarters for the 500 companies are spread amongst 39 states and the District of Columbia.

Narrowing further to the Fortune 100, Walmart Inc is not alone in choosing a hub off the beaten path:

• Berkshire Hathaway - Omaha, NE

• Eli Lilly - Indianapolis, IN

• Procter & Gamble - Cincinnati, OH

• State Farm - Bloomington, IL

• Humana - Louisville, KY

• FedEx - Memphis, TN

And falling just outside that top 100 is John Deere of Moline, IL. (Let me tell you, if Peoria isn’t a global hub, then Moline definitely is not.)

While not the majority, numerous top public firms remain in non-major executive hubs. They clearly continue to surmount geographic barriers and remain competitive.

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So where does that leave us? Or more importantly, where does it leave Panera?

Relocating your traditional corporate headquarters is no surefire guarantee of success. The burden of proof should be on moving, not on remaining.

Could Panera have captured the advantages of Boston without moving nearly all other employees out of St. Louis?

It’s difficult to become Walmart overnight, not only in terms of sheer market influence but also in terms of an internal promotions culture. But you can require executives to move to the institution, not the other way around.

Creating a more portable headquarters, like Caterpillar, while leaving the majority of the workforce in the historic home remains an alternative if suitable executives are unwilling to relocate to St. Louis.

But, Panera did the calculus required to make a “Stay” or “Go” decision. It chose “Go” and “organizational reset.”

Time will tell if it would have been better to remain “St. Louis Bread Company.”

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$12.99.

The price of a monthly Apple TV subscription... And a major hurdle.

It’s the bar Major League Soccer needed to clear by the end of the 2026 FIFA World Cup1.

Did it?

Created as part of the USA’s agreement to host the 1994 World Cup, MLS has always struggled for TV viewership compared to the “Big Four” professional sports in America: the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. MLS matches draw in-person crowds. But American soccer fans are more likely to watch the Premier League, Liga MX, or the UEFA Champions League on TV than their local MLS club.

MLS’s current contract with Apple TV expires in 2029. As in most professional sports, TV money beats ticket money. And MLS needs more money from its next TV contract to be competitive on the global player transfer market.

The 2026 World Cup was about as close as modern America could get to 1990s monoculture vibes. Everyone (even my mom) watched. MLS had years to get ready, to coordinate with FOX, to strike while the iron is hot.

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Every Saturday afternoon this summer, I’ve been taking “Selling Yourself and Your Ideas” (or as I call it, “storytelling class”) with Professor Tiana S. Clark, The Audacious Commander.

People need stories to connect emotionally. Characters, context, conflict, climax, closure. You don’t win over audiences (or pitch yourself!) without them.

The World Cup had plenty of stories:

Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo making their (likely?) final World Cup appearances with Spain’s wonderkid Lamine Yamal rising to replace them.

Christian Pulisic, Tyler Adams, and the USMNT aiming for a deeper run than any modern American team.

Viral social media stars like Freddy, the German fan road-tripping from Buc-ee’s to Walmart to Waffle House.

And of all the stories that broke through, how many involved players from MLS?

One.

Because Messi’s the GOAT, not because he plays for Inter Miami.

But other stories?

Christian “Captain America” Pulisic plays for AC Milan in Italy’s Serie A.

England’s Jude Bellingham and France’s Kylian Mbappé? Both are Real Madrid galácticos in Spain’s La Liga.

That mighty viking of Norway that is Erling Braut Haaland? Manchester City. Premier League.

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A key insight I had early-on in this truly transformational class was: Good storytelling is not improv. It takes time and practice. Effectively selling anything requires dedicated thought about what authentic stories will resonate best for each moment. A master storyteller has a quiver full of stories and selects the correct one for each moment. They make you feel specific emotions and don’t only present data or numbers.

As much as I enjoyed watching the World Cup, I formed no emotional attachment to any MLS player, much less to an MLS team.

I cheer for Notre Dame Football because I lived there for four years. And for Da Bears because my parents moved from Chicago to Downstate Illinois. There’s emotional connection. They’re in my blood and make my heart race when games get too close. A loss (especially to Southern Cal or Michigan) sours my whole following week.

FOX couldn’t ignore major stories from other teams, especially after the USMNT lost in the knockout rounds. Americans want those stories too! Part of the beauty of the FIFA World Cup is the celebration of a global phenomena and all of its participants! Stories like Curacao qualifying for the first time or the Scots drinking Boston dry were great, but the RIGHT stories for MLS’s strategic goal were missing.

Specifically broadcasting to an American audience (who watched in record numbers) meant also purposefully curating some stories focused on the MLS. (And make no mistake: FIFA wants American viewership of the MLS to grow. We’re a huge, untapped market.)

What emotions would I, a soccer novice, need to feel to want to keep watching given Notre Dame and the NFL would soon be on TV almost every weekend? (True fans know how needed a bye week can be for both players and for ourselves.)

Perhaps convincing me to do so was always impossible?

But FOX and the MLS had ample time to select the best stories for this crucial moment, the ones to plant the seed of emotional investment in Major League Soccer. It felt like they didn’t even try.

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So, Apple TV won’t be getting my $12.99 a month.

But I’ll see the USWNT next summer. And the USMNT again in 2030.

Hopefully I don’t forget what “offsides” means before then.

Time will tell whether others feel the same way and forgo watching the MLS. If they too didn’t hear, see, and feel the right stories this summer.

Maybe we all just end up casually watching the Premier League on NBC before our regularly scheduled football viewing instead?

(Promotion and relegation sounds like a wild ride. Business reasons for the top schools aside, let’s import that to whatever Super League invades college football in the 2030s2. An optimized systems isn’t always optimized for each individual.)

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I’m that nerdy kid who always liked learning and going to school.

As a college sophomore home on Christmas vacation, I found my mom (a now-retired business law and ethics professor at Bradley University in Peoria, IL) in the kitchen, wearing a t-shirt saying:

“No matter what you major in,”

And as she turned around, I saw:

“You’ll end up in business.”

“But no, Mom,” I protested. “I’m gonna be a doctor. I don’t need to know about business.”

She just laughed and told me to set the table for dinner.

And now here I am, nearly two decades later, a practicing pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist at a major children’s hospital in Chicago and an MBA student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Turns out, my mother is always right (about everything).

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I’ve always enjoyed thinking about big problems and what’s at their core.

In high school, my friends and I sat around in someone’s living room debating mid-2000s current events and politics. (Again, I was and remain a nerd.)

In college, I majored in biology and worked in a research lab studying zebrafish retinas. Because med school, med school, med school.

But then in med school era, I kept finding myself at the college bookstore, buying books unrelated to anatomy and physiology. Or at the Institute of Politics, listening some talk or attending office hours with a guest- or scholar-in-residence.

One of my proudest moments: After leading a moderated discussion with former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Sarah Kliff (then at Vox.com and now a health care reporter for the New York Times) telling me she liked my question about Romneycare serving as a model for the ACA and how would politicians propose new federal insurance programs without first seeing them tried on a smaller, state level.

Double nerd alert: I almost went as far as getting a public policy masters degree during medical school. Except, I had no idea how I’d use it. You don’t need an MBA to know that combo is an NPV < $0 style investment.

I completed much of my anesthesiology residency and pediatrics fellowship year during the onset and immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lots of learning for me. Countless business and policy changes for the world.

Once done with my training, I moved back home to the Peoria area and worked in private practice. But I couldn’t see myself doing that day-in, day-out for the next 35 years. Taking care of kids is wonderful, but doing only clinical work left some itches unscratched.

I paid off all my medical school loans, moved back up to Chicago several months after starting the Evening & Weekend MBA Program at Kellogg, and joined the cardiac team at a major children’s hospital1 where I’d rotated years before during residency.

Everything is a business (whether we want it to be or not) so understanding money and incentives matters when you want to change the world (or at least part of it).

Why do many hospitals offer only the bare minimum of pediatric services? Why do essential items like emergency drugs or newborn baby supplies go on shortage? Why did Caterpillar (mostly) leave Peoria (and why did the economies of so many small or rural towns change)?

All business problems.

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What Do I Care About?

Personally, I care about where I’m from: this small town outside a Rust Belt city, and if you’re truly from there, you add an invisible R to the name.

For years, I lacked the vocabulary to describe that feeling. The closest I ever got was the concepts described in David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere. He writes in the aftermath of Brexit and on shifting political coalitions (driven by larger socioeconomic changes), but I take it more broadly. I’m a somewhere who, by a odd mixture of nature and nurture, feels a deep connection to where I am from and want to do the work to keep it an option for those who also call it home (and for anyone who’d like to do so). It’s not about one place being better or worse than another, but simply that one place is mine.

Someone else I strongly believe is a somewhere according to my definition of the term?

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio.

Or as you may know him, Bad Bunny. He clearly cares deeply about Puerto Rico and places its survival and success at the center of nearly all he does. He’s a somebody from somewhere.

I’ve no connection to Puerto Rico. But I know the feeling, except about a place with less ocean and more backcountry roads and lots of corn.

Professionally, I care about kids, about their health and their likelihood of thriving.

Like most people who work in pediatric health care (and with kids more broadly), I can’t tell you why I prefer it. It’s simply a feeling best described as #iykyk.

That feeling influences what I do on a daily basis. It’s what allows me to keep working through some very late nights and in the face of some really sad stories. Kids matter.

I care about the larger ecosystem, both business and policy, that allows us to care for kids, to set them up for success later in life. I could make an argument about “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” but instead I’ll simply say it again. Kids matter. Your kids matter.

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Academically, I care about strategy.

I love making a pun about working in “operations management” when a classmate asks “So, what do you do?”

But deep down, I care about how the rules of the game change the X’s and O’s and how to best adapt to those changing rules.

That high school nerd who loved debating current events simply grew up into an adult nerd who still likes reading about current events, history, and how public policy impacts those of us playing the game.

But that nerd doesn’t only want to discuss the rules of the game, he wants to be an active player. Can I change culture in an earthshaking way? No. I’m not Taylor Swift on her record breaking Eras Tour. Nor can I introduce society altering technologies like AI or GLP-1s.

But what I can do is learn about and harness those strategic trends to affect the people, places, and things I do care deeply about.

The exact form that will take and what my future holds is still up for grabs. But it’ll be something interesting. You can count on that.

Why Start a Newsletter Now?

A professor told me to!

No, seriously. While discussing approaches to networking and using LinkedIn in “storytelling” class (more on that excellent class in my first post), my professor highlighted a post of mine and told me to consider writing a newsletter.

During my college nerd era, I was part of that 1-2% of kids who at three dining hall meals a day. In the peace and quiet that was an early breakfast, I’d read the opinion pages of whatever newspapers were available. I love reading arguments and deciding if I agree or disagree with them.

Aside from a love of long form argument, I want to define myself rather than allow someone else (or something else like AI) to do so on my behalf.

This newsletter is my attempt to do just that (freed from the confines of LinkedIn’s 3,000 character limit).

I hope you’ll join me and engage.

Tell me where I’m right.

But more importantly, show me my blindspots.

As we see what the future holds.

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