Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright finds his answers in the restaurants

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. After Scott Boatwright became CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill in November 2024, he added two red chairs to the black seats in the boardroom at the restaurant company’s Newport Beach, California, headquarters. The red chairs are meant to remind executives and directors of the two kinds of stakeholders often not represented in their meetings: restaurant workers and customers. He also installed a sign outside the conference room that reads: “THE ANSWERS ARE IN THE RESTAURANTS.” “I often see leadership teams sit around a boardroom and hypothesize about problems that are happening out in the business, and then they start to spin up solutions to address those problems that they haven’t accurately identified,” Boatwright says. “They spin up ideas, put the ideas in place in restaurants, and never go to see how that work landed in the restaurant. You need to go accurately identify the challenge that you see. And the only way you can do that is talking to the people who are closest to the problem—not the people sitting around the board table.” Rising through the ranks Looking for answers in restaurants isn’t just a slogan for Boatwright—it’s how he learned the business. He was a dishwasher during high school, and in college he worked at a resort’s banquet operations, where he rose from setting up tables to becoming the assistant food and beverage manager. He spent 18 years with Arby’s Restaurant Group before joining Chipotle in 2017 as chief operating officer. Chipotle’s board named Boatwright interim CEO in August 2024 when Brian Niccol decamped for Starbucks, and announced him as permanent CEO a fe