Know What Matters

27

Making the Transformation Operational

Almost two years to the day after I’d “retired” from Panera, I was back where it all began: serving sandwiches. Only these weren’t sandwiches that a customer walked up to the counter and asked me to make; they’d been ordered through our new digital kiosk. I could hardly believe that I was working inside the world my memo had described—at least in prototype form. We’d put together the first “Panera 2.0” café at a location in Braintree, Massachusetts, and in the summer of 2012, I was basically living in it. Together with our COO, Chuck Chapman; our technology consultant, Blaine Hurst; and a couple of other key team members, I was running the store and, in the process, testing and refining our new digital ...