HQ

aka HeadQuarters

For his 1988 book City: Rediscovering the Center, William Whyte, the Fortune journalist turned sociologist, charted the recent movement to the suburbs of the headquarters of such New York City Fortune 500 headquarters as GeneralFoods, IBM, and Olin. Lo and behold, of the thirty-eight companies that left Manhattan, thirty-one ended up moving to suburban sites close to their CEO-s’ houses—in these cases, within an average of eight miles of Greenwich Ct. “They don’t have to compare area A with area B and area C,” wrote Whyte. “All they have to do is look in the phone directory. Where does the boss live? That is where the company is going.”