At Ancestry, CEO Howard Hochhauser does not treat lunch as a corner-office ritual. He eats in the office eating area with employees, a habit he says he learned from Ace Greenberg while working at Bear Stearns in the late 1990s.
Hochhauser said Greenberg would sit among employees at midday, and the image stayed with him. 'You could talk to him, he wasn’t sitting in some glass office that’s untouchable,' he told Fortune. The point, he said, is access to 'unfiltered information.'
That matters, he said, because CEOs can get wrapped 'in this bubble.' Breaking bread with staff helps him hear what people are really thinking about policies and decisions before those ideas harden into conflict.
He pointed to Ancestry’s in-person work expectations as one example. Two days before announcing the policy, Hochhauser ran the idea by staff informally. Employees raised concerns about caregiving, school drop-offs, evening soccer games, and helping children move into college. He said people appreciated the candor and that the company took the direct feedback into account.
When he communicated the policy, Hochhauser told employees: 'You’re an adult. Use your judgment.' That line captures the larger management style on display here: fewer layers, more directness, and a clearer line between executive assumptions and employee reality.
The same pattern is showing up elsewhere in corporate America and Europe. ABN Amro’s CEO, Marguerite Bérard, has been meeting weekly with eight to 10 colleagues over sandwiches while the bank works through a planned reduction of around 5,200 staffers between 2024 and 2028. The bank had already been hit by lower-than-expected 2025 fourth-quarter net profit, and Bérard told the Financial Times that building consensus and coalitions matters in the Netherlands.
Apple’s former CEO Tim Cook also frequently sat down with random employees in the company’s cafeteria during lunch, while Duolingo leaders say daily team lunches are 'fundamental' to company culture and help surface the 'real stuff.'
For management, the lesson is not sentimental. Capital rewards clear rules, but it also rewards leaders who know what is happening inside their own operation. If the administrative state buries information under process, companies can do the same with org charts, glass offices, and polished status meetings.
Lunch with workers may not look like a productivity strategy. But it can be a cheap way to cut through hierarchy, hear the truth faster, and keep free enterprise tied to reality instead of executive theater.
