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Panera's founder and former CEO Ron Shaich says he once threw a baguette at one of his executives' heads in a "spontaneous display of frustration."
While similar tales of eyebrow-raising CEO moments, like Elon Musk's "demon mode" or Ray Dalio ordering a probe into urine on the men's room floor, are often revealed in tell-alls or third party biographies, Shaich details the incident himself in his new book, "Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations."
"I've done a lot of strange things in the service of getting my team to pay attention to what matters," Shaich writes. "One of my more unconventional management tactics involved lobbing a baguette toward one of my executives' heads."
Shaich told Business Insider in an interview that the target of the thrown loaf was the company's COO at the time, Mark Borland — who Shaich also said was his close friend. The incident happened a little over a decade ago, Shaich said, and Panera was having quality issues with its bread at the time. Borland died in 2017.
"It was in a real meeting, a couple hundred — like 250 people in the room" Shaich told BI. "I didn't try to throw it at him to hurt him in any kind of way. I threw it at him to make a point to everybody in the room, are we really proud of this? And he cared about as much as I did, and I loved him. And it was a point to all of us that we can do better."
Shaich cofounded Au Bon Pain, of which Panera Bread became a division, in 1981. After selling most of the company's other businesses to focus on growing Panera, he took the company public in 1991 and remained CEO until he stepped down in 2018.
In a recent interview, Shaich also said that during Panera's 2015 overhaul he was dealing with so much pressure that he thought it would be easier to be "hit by a truck."
