What’s behind Walgreens CEO Roz Brewer’s abrupt departure?

The decision was “mutually agreed” upon by Brewer and Walgreens’s board, the company said. Brewer, who had been in the job for less than three years, used the same language in a LinkedIn post and an internal email to Walgreens employees seen by Coins2Day.

“This is perhaps one of the most difficult notes I have ever written over the course of my career,” Brewer wrote in both notes. Spokespeople for her and for Walgreens declined to comment further to Coins2Day on Friday.

Stuart Isett—Coins2Day

Brewer’s departure means that the most powerful Black woman running a Coins2Day 500 company—and one of only two Black female CEOs in the Coins2Day 500 at the start of last week—is out of a job, at least temporarily. (She will advise Walgreens on its search for a permanent CEO, the company said; Walgreens is paying her $9 million in severance, plus $2.25 million in consulting fees for the next six months, according to a securities filing Friday.)

Pharma industry veteran and Walgreens independent director Ginger Graham will serve as acting CEO until Walgreens names a permanent replacement.

The sudden departure is a stunning move for Brewer, a well-respected retail operator who was previously chief operating officer at Starbucks and CEO of Walmart’s Sam’s Club. She arrived at Walgreens in March 2021, just as the struggling pharmacy chain and its competitors were navigating the messy rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. “I couldn’t think of anything else more important than keeping people healthy. I would not have done this for any other company except for WBA, quite honestly,” Brewer told my former colleague Beth Kowitt in October 2021.

Her departure also raises questions about Walgreens’s ability to pull off the ambitious pivot towards health care that Brewer had announced six months after becoming Walgreens CEO. Like larger rival CVS, Walgreens under Brewer has been buying up primary-care clinics and trying to turn itself into a full-service health care provider. But a transformation of that magnitude takes time, and it appears to be going more slowly than both Walgreens and its investors would like: In June, the company cut its full-year earnings guidance, while executives acknowledged that they were “disappointed with the pace of our path to profitability” in its health care business.

It’s also unclear how much support Brewer’s health care strategy had from Walgreens executive chairman (and former CEO and largest shareholder) Stefano Pessina. The Wall Street Journal in January reported that Pessina envisioned a slower expansion into health care, one that was “best achieved through partnerships and minority stakes,” and that he said that “buying up companies outside of the core pharmacy industry unnecessarily exposed Walgreens to risk.” Spokespeople for Walgreens and Brewer did not respond to requests for comment over the weekend.

As she announced her departure on Friday, Brewer stood by her health care efforts. “Perhaps what I’m most proud of is our work to develop a strategic pivot towards the growth of WBA into health care,” she wrote to employees. “I’m proud of what we have done together. So let me take a moment to say thank you, because your hard work and leadership has been—and will continue to be—critical to the transformation of WBA.”

Maria Aspan
[email protected]
@mariaaspan

The Broadsheet is Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.

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ON MY RADAR

Sandra Hüller, actress of the year?Hollywood Reporter

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‘She’s totally lost it’: inside story of the unravelling of Liz Truss’s premiership The Guardian

PARTING WORDS

"The average U.S. Single adult doesn’t date because they don’t know how to flirt."

—Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, who's using A.I. To teach people how to flirt again.