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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Every Guest Experience is produced by a person. Not a system, not a protocol, not a technology platform. A person. The cast member who greets the table, reads the Guest, makes the judgment call in the moment, and produces either a transaction or a relationship. Which means the Guest Experience is downstream of the Employee […]
Not with a training program. Not with a script. Not with a mystery shopper or a service recovery protocol or a customer satisfaction survey. You overcome it by understanding what produces it in the first place. Poor service delivery is not a knowledge problem. The cast member who delivers poor service is not unaware that […]
The question assumes the problem is management technique. It is not. The problem is foundational — a set of misunderstandings so deeply embedded in how the industry thinks about itself that the management failures are predictable outcomes, not random failures. A misunderstanding about growth. Most operators in hospitality believe growth is a revenue event. It […]
Domino’s Pizza built a system for handling customer complaints that requires no human contact. An order arrives late and cold. The customer goes to the website, selects their excuse from a dropdown menu, chooses a resolution from a pre-approved list, and the transaction is complete. No conversation. No accountability. No human being on either side […]
QFO: “What should you do if your employees complain about their wages? If your business cannot afford to raise their wages, does this mean a pay freeze or redundancies to create room for wage increases?” The question contains the answer, and most operators miss it. If your cast is asking for more money and the […]
There is a hiring practice so deeply embedded in corporate America that questioning it gets you looked at like you just said something dangerous. It has consultants, certifications, and decades of institutional momentum behind it. It is also largely useless for the independent restaurant operator who needs to know in 45 minutes whether the person […]
The operator who cannot find a General Manager has a talent problem. The operator who has been running ads for four months without filling the position has a different problem, one that the ads will not solve. Talent is not scarce for the operator who has built the conditions that attract it. It is scarce […]
Wrong question. The right question is whether the operation was designed to produce operating profit from Guest one. If it was, the answer is immediately. If it was not, the answer is never, at least not without redesigning the cost structure that should have been built correctly before the doors opened. There is a distinction […]
The benefit is always less than if your brand controlled everything it touches. Using a third-party to execute a significant portion of your Guest experience can be crippling. The Guest’s loyalty then is with the delivery brand and not your brand regardless. You’ve become a commodity.
They can be, if: it’s the right kind of busy it’s the right kind of busy it’s the right kind of busy Just because a location is in a busy area doesn’t mean it’s the right kind of busy for your restaurant. If you depend on transient traffic then you are continually going to be […]
The word loyalty has been hijacked. In the restaurant industry it has been redefined to mean a discount that rewards a Guest for dining with you or incentivizes them to return at some future point. The result is a system that trains Guests to think transactionally — to respond to points, rewards, and incentives rather […]
The question is wrong. The right question is: what does this specific Guest need from this specific menu in this specific market for this operation to be profitable at the price point it requires? The answer to that question determines the menu size. Not a best practice. Not a competitor benchmark. Not a theory about […]
It is not the bad boss. The bad boss is a symptom. Every reason cited for why cast members leave — bad culture, poor leadership, inadequate pay, difficult Guests, broken processes, no work-life balance — is a symptom of the same underlying condition. They are descriptions of what the environment felt like, not explanations of […]
Get the read you cannot get for yourself. Most operators who fail in the first year failed before they opened. Not because they lacked passion. Not because the concept was wrong. Because they built on assumptions that were never tested, costs that were never modeled, and a Guest experience that was never designed for the […]