Last
summer a trim guy with wavy brown hair, high cheekbones, and a broad
smile could be found making Whoppers, working the drive-through window,
and scrubbing bathrooms at a Burger King in Miami. His name was Daniel
Schwartz. He learned to make a Whopper in less than 35 seconds and
blended in well with his fellow employees, except for the fact that
Schwartz had a guy with a video camera trailing him. “I cleaned about
15 toilets in the past two days,” he boasted at one point, as if he’d
just completed a marathon.
Boru O'Brien O'Connell for Bloomberg BusinessweekBehind this week’s cover
Schwartz was justifiably pumped. That June he’d been named
Burger King’s (BKW)
chief executive officer, with a $700,000 annual salary and a potential
cash bonus of twice that. There was another reason for Schwartz to be
exuberant: He was only 32 and well on his way to becoming a star in the
fast-food industry.
Making sure the fixtures in Burger King’s
restrooms gleam is only one of Schwartz’s challenges. He’s Burger King’s
21st CEO since the company was founded in 1954. The chain has had six
owners and suffered from years of neglect and strategic incoherence.
Unlike his predecessors, Schwartz isn’t just competing with
McDonald’s (MCD) and
Wendy’s (WEN). He has to keep customers from straying to trendy newcomers such as
Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) and
Panera Bread (PNRA).
Their sales in the U.S. last year grew 17 percent and 12 percent,
respectively, according to Technomic, a food industry consultant. Sales
were essentially flat for Burger King and its two primary rivals.
Schwartz looks much as he did when he was a student on the
dean’s list at Cornell University, all the way back in the Aughts. He
had no experience in fast food before going to Burger King; he spent
almost a decade on Wall Street after college. And he’s surrounded
himself with a similarly eager and fresh-faced inner circle. Josh Kobza,
the chief financial officer, is 28. He and Schwartz are usually joined
on conference calls by Alexandre Macedo, Burger King’s ancient
36-year-old president for North American operations, and Sami Siddiqui,
the head of investor relations, who’s 29. Only one of the four saw a day
of the Seventies.
Schwartz is an outlier in the corporate world.
Matteo Tonello, managing director at the Conference Board, a nonprofit
research organization that studies such things, says chief executives
that young are a rarity outside of tech enclaves such as Silicon Valley.
He says the average age of an incoming CEO at a company in the Standard
& Poor’s 500-stock index was 53 last year. Schwartz would be the
second-youngest CEO on the Fortune 1000 (behind Mark Zuckerberg) if
Burger King made that list, according to figures from BoardEx, a firm
that analyzes data about corporate executives and directors. “The
conventional wisdom is that you need an experienced candidate,” Tonello
says. “There’s still a lot of skepticism toward younger ones.”
Sandy
Douglas drinks one Coca-Cola every day. He likes it early, before noon,
sometimes accompanied by a cup of coffee. “You get an espresso, you get
your caffeine and have this for lunch, and you’re ahead,” he says
between sips from Coke’s old-fashioned 8-ounce glass bottle. When it’s
over, he doesn’t allow himself a second. “I will probably have a Coke
Zero in the afternoon at some point,” he concedes, but not another
regular one because it has too many calories. “That’s approximately my
daily regimen.”
