No Growth
No Growth Two words. That's the whole diagnosis. Every operator I talk to has a list. Difficult managers. Low pay. Bad schedules. [...]
The Five-Minute Speech You Have Never Given
Jack Welch spent twenty years giving the same five-minute speech. The specifics changed as GE changed, but the structure never did: Here [...]
Why Your Leadership Training Is Not Working
Plato argued he needed fifty years to develop a good leader. Most restaurant operations give it three days — a seminar, a [...]
Eight Of Your Ten Cast Members Are Not Giving You Their Best
Twenty percent. That is the share of employees who report giving their very best to their jobs when surveyed across industries and [...]
The Values On Your Wall Are Not Your Values
There is almost no correlation between the words a company posts about its values and the behavior of the people who work [...]
You Are Managing Your Restaurant With Tunnel Vision
In the late 1990s, John Seely Brown — chief scientist at Xerox PARC — was trying to explain why most computer interfaces [...]
Change Without Transition Is Just Disruption
When you change something in your operation — the menu, the service sequence, the room layout, the hours, the price — you [...]
Why Your Last Change Initiative Did Not Stick
The evidence on organizational change is consistent across decades and industries: most change initiatives fail. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not [...]
The Welder Who Didn’t Tell His Supervisor
In the early 1990s, Caterpillar was in the middle of one of the most significant organizational transformations in American manufacturing history. The [...]
Your Cast Is Not The Problem. Your System Is.
The evidence has been clear for decades: most people problems in organizations are not people problems. They are system problems wearing people's [...]
Is Your Restaurant A Military Organization — And Do You Even Know It
In 2004, researchers at Booz Allen Hamilton surveyed more than 4,000 employees across companies of every size and industry and asked them [...]
Stand In One Spot And Look For Waste Until You Can Actually See It
Taiichi Ohno built the Toyota Production System — the operating framework that transformed manufacturing and became the foundation for lean thinking, Six [...]
Your Restaurant Operates At The Edge Of Chaos — That Is Not A Problem, It Is The Point
In 1996, a biologist named Stuart Kauffman published a theory about how complex systems — cells, ecosystems, economies — organize themselves. His [...]
Ram Charan Said Fieldwork Is A Lost Art — He Was Right
Ram Charan has advised GE, DuPont, Novartis, Home Depot, and Verizon. He spent 35 years as one of the world's foremost leadership [...]
Larry Bossidy Said It In 2002. Most Operators Still Haven’t Heard It
In 2002, Larry Bossidy — the man who turned AlliedSignal into a reliable earnings machine and then came back to rescue Honeywell [...]
Do You Have Crabs?
You've seen crabs in a bucket. Just when one gets close to the edge, the others grab hold and pull it back [...]