From The Playbook

"Field notes from 44 years on the stage."

The Five-Minute Speech You Have Never Given

The Five-Minute Speech You Have Never Given 0

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

Why Your Leadership Training Is Not Working 0

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

Eight Of Your Ten Cast Members Are Not Giving You Their Best 0

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

The Values On Your Wall Are Not Your Values 0

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 [...]
You Are Managing Your Restaurant With Tunnel Vision

You Are Managing Your Restaurant With Tunnel Vision 0

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

Change Without Transition Is Just Disruption 0

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

Why Your Last Change Initiative Did Not Stick 0

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 [...]
The Welder Who Didn’t Tell His Supervisor

The Welder Who Didn’t Tell His Supervisor 0

In the early 1990s, Caterpillar was in the middle of one of the most significant organizational transformations in American manufacturing history. The company had nearly gone bankrupt. It had restructured completely — eliminating its entire centralized management system overnight and pushing decision-making authority down to individual business units. Managers who had spent careers waiting for [...]
Your Cast Is Not The Problem. Your System Is.

Your Cast Is Not The Problem. Your System Is. 0

The evidence has been clear for decades: most people problems in organizations are not people problems. They are system problems wearing people's faces. Employees do not generally act against their own organization's interests deliberately. They respond rationally to what they see, what they understand, and how they are rewarded. When the behavior looks wrong from [...]
Is Your Restaurant A Military Organization — And Do You Even Know It

Is Your Restaurant A Military Organization — And Do You Even Know It 0

In 2004, researchers at Booz Allen Hamilton surveyed more than 4,000 employees across companies of every size and industry and asked them to describe how their organizations actually worked — not how leadership said they worked, but how decisions got made, how information flowed, and whether anything actually changed when change was needed. They identified [...]
Stand In One Spot And Look For Waste Until You Can Actually See It

Stand In One Spot And Look For Waste Until You Can Actually See It 0

Taiichi Ohno built the Toyota Production System — the operating framework that transformed manufacturing and became the foundation for lean thinking, Six Sigma, and virtually every process improvement methodology that followed. He was also, by all accounts, a brutal teacher. When a promising young engineer joined Toyota, Ohno's standard welcome was to draw a chalk [...]
By The Time The Data Is Clear, The Game Is Already Over

By The Time The Data Is Clear, The Game Is Already Over 0

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

The Thinking That Got You Here Is Now The Problem 0

There is a concept in complexity science called entrainment of thinking. It describes what happens when ideas and practices that have proven effective in the past become accepted norms — acquiring inertia, becoming invisible, becoming impossible to question not because they are right but because they have always been done that way. The thinking that [...]
Your Restaurant Operates At The Edge Of Chaos — That Is Not A Problem, It Is The Point

Your Restaurant Operates At The Edge Of Chaos — That Is Not A Problem, It Is The Point 0

In 1996, a biologist named Stuart Kauffman published a theory about how complex systems — cells, ecosystems, economies — organize themselves. His central finding: the most adaptive, highest-performing systems do not operate in perfect order. They do not operate in chaos either. They operate at the edge between the two. He called it the sweet [...]
Ram Charan Said Fieldwork Is A Lost Art — He Was Right

Ram Charan Said Fieldwork Is A Lost Art — He Was Right 0

Ram Charan has advised GE, DuPont, Novartis, Home Depot, and Verizon. He spent 35 years as one of the world's foremost leadership consultants, on the road 365 days a year, inside the organizations that define how business gets done at scale. In 2004, he and Larry Bossidy published Confronting Reality — a follow-up to Execution — built around [...]
Larry Bossidy Said It In 2002. Most Operators Still Haven’t Heard It

Larry Bossidy Said It In 2002. Most Operators Still Haven’t Heard It 0

In 2002, Larry Bossidy — the man who turned AlliedSignal into a reliable earnings machine and then came back to rescue Honeywell — published a book called Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. He spent the better part of his last years in management trying to teach the business world one thing: that strategy without [...]
Do You Have Crabs?

Do You Have Crabs? 0

Avoid crabs in a bucket: Have you ever watched crabs in a bucket? Just when one of them is about to escape, the others grab hold and pull it back down. The crabs do not want to see the other crabs make it out. By their very nature, they keep each other from winning. Unfortunately, [...]
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