The Pattern Is the Same Everywhere
Position I read Gartner CIO reports. Not because restaurants are like enterprise IT. Because reading enough cross-domain material reveals the same pattern [...]
Relational Hospitality
Not a technology. Not a data strategy. Not a luxury hotel concept. A human framework for the independent restaurant operator who wants…
What Warren Buffett Taught Me About How to Run a Better Restaurant
In 1969, Warren Buffett wrote a line in his partnership letter that most investors have read and almost none have fully applied: [...]
The Advantage You Already Have and Aren’t Using
The large hospitality companies are in crisis. Turnover is catastrophic. Burnout is systemic. Guest experience is declining. The diagnosis from inside those [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Your Current Business Design Will Eventually Fail — That Is Not A Prediction, It Is A Guarantee
Three Harvard Business School professors wrote something in 1996 that most operators have never heard and need to read twice: "Outward value [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
By The Time The Data Is Clear, The Game Is Already Over
Clayton Christensen spent his career studying why great companies fail. The answer was not incompetence. It was that they waited for the data to confirm what the theory had already told them — and by then, it was too late.
The Thinking That Got You Here Is Now The Problem
There is a concept in complexity science called entrainment of thinking. It describes what happens when ideas and practices that have proven [...]
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 [...]