Ron Shaich

And I handed in this vision for a radical transformation of Panera to Bill Morton, who had become the CEO.

And Bill was my very dear friend, 20-year colleague, and looked at me and said, wow.

He said, I don't have anybody to work on this.

Would you go work on it?

And I said, yeah, I'll have some fun with it.

And $25 million later in another year, the executive chairman is working 80 hours a week on this vision for how to have integrated technology change the guest experience, change the whole deal.

I was loving it.

I had none of the ceremonial duties of being a CEO.

I didn't have to tell people what I just did.

I didn't have to tell them what I was going to do.

I just was dealing with the product.

And Bill came to me and said he personally had a problem.

He couldn't travel.

Something had happened in his family.

And he said, maybe we should make you CEO again and I should step down.

And we debated it because it wasn't what I wanted necessarily.

But it seemed to be necessary at a certain point.

And maybe nine months or a year later, we executed that.

We just swapped positions.

He became executive vice chairman and I became a CEO again.