Jeffrey Summers, Author at Jeffrey Summers

The Conversation About AI and Leadership Is the Same One I’ve Been Having About Road 1 and Road 2 For Decades

For decades, the AI and leadership conversation has been framed as human vs. machine. Which tasks will AI replace. Which skills will remain relevant. Whether leaders will be optimized out of existence or elevated by the tools available to them. I’ve been having a different version of this conversation for 44 years. I just called […]

The Casual Full-Service Problem Isn’t the Food

Walk into any casual full-service chain and count the friction points before you’ve ordered your first drink. The menu — laminated, multi-page, every surface covered in promotional pricing and limited-time offers. The QR code that sends you to a mobile ordering experience you didn’t ask for. The tableside tablet that wants to take your order, […]

Every Expert Has a Hammer

There’s a concept in design called the Rorschach test. Show someone an inkblot and what they see reveals something about how they think, not about what’s actually there. The restaurant industry has its own version. Show a struggling restaurant to a systems consultant and they’ll see a process problem. Show it to an HR specialist […]

No Fat To Trim

A bankruptcy court just approved the breakup of Fat Brands across four separate transactions. Eighteen restaurant chains. $1.4 billion in debt. One concept shut down entirely before the sale was even complete. Thirteen brands handed to the lenders who financed them through credit bids totaling nearly $955 million. Two more — Hot Dog on a […]

A Mediocre Guest Experience Is the Cement, Not the Platform

The dashboard is green. The numbers are clean. The room is dying anyway. Forty-four years on the stage, and the same argument keeps coming back wearing a new outfit. The revenue-management thinker has the data. The frame the data sits inside is the room the operator cannot see he is standing in. There is a […]

It’s Egotistical Ignorance.

After 44 years in this business, I still ask questions to anyone with a pulse in the operation. Not because I lack confidence in my own judgment. Because I understand something that took me longer than I’d like to admit to fully accept: Knowledge isn’t static. Reality isn’t either. And treating a snapshot as your […]

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 organizations is familiar — better scheduling software, smarter labor algorithms, more efficient procedures. That diagnosis is wrong. It treats symptoms while the actual disease goes unaddressed. The disease is that corporate hospitality systematically [...]

Speed Is Not The Problem You Think It Is

There is a version of QSR management that treats speed as the primary metric — the holy grail that, if hit, fixes everything else. Faster ticket times. Shorter line times. More cars per hour. The logic sounds right until you watch what actually happens when you put pressure on speed. Your 19-year-old cook puts two [...]

The Wrong Kind of Tough

There are two kinds of rigidity in a restaurant operation. One keeps you alive. One kills you slowly while you convince yourself it's commitment. The operator who holds the line on Guest experience standards when the cast is tired, when it's slow, when nobody's watching — that's the right kind. The standard doesn't bend because [...]

When You Let AI Speak For You, You’ve Already Left The Stage

AI doesn't eliminate judgment. It relocates it. That's the shift most operators miss. When you use AI to write your job posting, respond to a negative review, describe your menu, or draft your marketing copy, you're not saving time. You're embedding someone else's judgment into your operation and calling it efficiency. The model doesn't know [...]

The Cheapest Consultant You’ll Ever Have

An unhappy Guest is the most honest feedback the marketplace will ever hand you. It costs nothing to receive and most operators waste it anyway. Not because they don't care. Because they're managing their own discomfort instead of the Guest's problem — and then calling it customer service. There are two factory settings most operators [...]

When Everyone Asks the Same Question

A paper published earlier this year compared more than 350 AI models and looked at the questions they get wrong. When models fail, they tend to fail together, agreeing on the same wrong answer about 60% of the time. Random chance would land at 33%. The best models were worst at this — clustering on [...]

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 is why the current situation cannot continue. Here is where we are going. Here is how we are getting there. He gave it in board meetings and in elevators. He gave it to [...]

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 workshop, maybe an online course — and then wonder why nothing changed. The research is consistent: most leadership programs produce awareness, not capability. The half-life of what was learned in the classroom is [...]

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 organizations. And that number gets lower, not higher, the longer people have been at the company. Read that slowly. Eight out of ten people working in your restaurant right now are not giving [...]

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 there. This finding comes from decades of organizational research — and it holds whether the organization is a Fortune 500 company or a twelve-table independent restaurant. The words on the wall do not [...]

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 migration is inevitable. That is why we can guarantee that your current business design will eventually fail." Not might fail. Not could fail under certain conditions. Will fail. The guarantee is structural, not [...]

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 exhausted their users. His illustration was simple and brutal. Take two empty toilet paper tubes. Tape them to your glasses. Walk around for three hours. By the end of those three hours, most [...]

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 are not just changing a process. You are changing a relationship. The Guest who has been coming to your restaurant for three years has built expectations. Not consciously. They do not think about [...]

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 because the execution was incompetent. Because the people who were supposed to implement the change were never convinced it was necessary — and nobody thought that was their job to address. The operator [...]

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