As more companies demand that hapless employees return to the office five days a week—think of Amazon and Dell recently—a starkly different trend has gone unnoticed: The number of CEOs who live hundreds of miles from headquarters, typically flying to the office for a few days a week, has been increasing for years.
Recent comprehensive research finds that the arrangement generally doesn’t work well. Long-distance CEOs underperform on average. The research also confirms suspicions that many workers may have harbored about fly-in CEOs. For example: If they own a boat, they tend to underperform even worse. And if they live within ten miles of a really nice golf course? Don’t even ask.
