When a restaurant isn't producing the margin it should, the building starts to feel like the problem. Too much rent. Too many seats to fill. Too much square footage to heat, cool, staff, and maintain. The operator looks around and thinks — if I could just get into a smaller space, the numbers would work. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]