Unreasonable Hospitality Summary

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Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara

The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

My Thoughts

The title of this book caught my attention when I heard the author on a leadership podcast. I also found the book intriguing because I enjoy reading and summarizing books about chefs and the food and beverage industry.

This book taught me so much about hospitality. It was also enjoyable to read read the various stories about guest interactions and what happens behind the scenes of a fine dining restaurant. I recommend this book and it was one of my favorites this year.

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My Favorite Quotes

• People will forget what you do, they’ll forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.
• All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.
• Run toward what you want instead of running away from what you don’t want.
• Don’t cannonball, ease into the pool.
• A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be.
• Every person on the team should be hearing more about what they did well, than what they could do better. Otherwise, they will feel deflated and unmotivated.
• If you can’t find more compliments to deliver than criticism, that’s a failure in leadership.
• The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.
• Go too fast and you will end up slowing the whole restaurant down.
• If you want to make any meaningful change, you have to surround yourself with a great team.
• If you hire someone lazy, your best team members will be punished for their excellence.
• As you grow up, you realize the people getting the most out of their lives are the ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves. The people who allow themselves to be passionate, open, and vulnerable. The ones who approach everything they love at full throttle with curiosity, delight, and unguarded enthusiasm.
• If you don’t have the courage to state a goal out loud, you’ll never achieve it.

Key Questions

• What’s the difference between service and hospitality?
• How do you make the people you work for, and the people you serve, feel seen and valued?
• How do you give them a sense of belonging?
• How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves?
• How do you make them feel welcome?
• At what point do you need to trade some control in favor of trusting the people on the ground?
• The only thing that matters is the guest experience. Does a rule bring us closer to our ultimate goal, connecting with people, or does it take us further from the goal?

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Welcome to the Hospitality Economy
• Chapter 2: Making Magic in a World That Could Use More of It
• Chapter 3: The Extraordinary Power of Intention
• Chapter 4: Lessons in Enlightened Hospitality
• Chapter 5: Restaurant-Smart vs. Corporate-Smart
• Chapter 6: Pursuing a True Partnership
• Chapter 7: Setting Expectations
• Chapter 8: Breaking Rules and Building a Team
• Chapter 9: Working with Purpose, on Purpose
• Chapter 10: Creating a Culture of Collaboration
• Chapter 11: Pushing Toward Excellence
• Chapter 12: Relationships Are Simple. Simple is Hard.
• Chapter 13: Leveraging Affirmation
• Chapter 14: Restoring Balance
• Chapter 15: The Best Offense is Offense
• Chapter 16: Earning Informality
• Chapter 17: Learning to Be Unreasonable
• Chapter 18: Improvisational Hospitality
• Chapter 19: Scaling a Culture
• Chapter 20: Back to Basics

Introduction

This is a book about how to treat people, how to listen, how to be curious, and how to learn to love the feeling of making others feel welcome. It is a book about how to make people feel like they belong. -Simon Sinek

What would happen if we approached hospitality with the same passion, attention to detail, and rigor that we bring to our food?

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Hospitality Economy

Will talks a lot about working for Chef Daniel Boulud in this chapter and throughout the book.

Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be cared for never goes away.

If we could become a restaurant focused passionately, intentionally, and wholeheartedly on connection and graciousness, on giving the people on our team and the people we served a sense of belonging, we could have a chance at greatness. 

This is what Will wrote as his definition of “Unreasonable Hospitality.”

Service is Black and White; Hospitality is Color

Will believes the best interview technique is no technique at all. Have enough of a conversation with them that you get to know them. Do they seem curious and passionate about what you are building? Do they have integrity? Are they someone you can respect? Is this someone you can imagine you and your team happily spending a lot of time with?

One of his favorite questions to ask was “What’s the difference between service and hospitality?” The best answer he ever got was “service is black and white; hospitality is color.”

Doing your job with competence and efficiency is black and white. Color means making people feel great about the job you are doing for them. Genuinely engaging with the person you are serving to make an authentic connection is hospitality.

No one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable. Look at every discipline in every arena. You must be unreasonable to see a world that doesn’t yet exist.

At Eleven Madison Park, they came to realize the remarkable power of being unreasonable about how they made people feel.

Will wrote this book because he believes it is time for everyone to start being unreasonable about hospitality.

Create a culture of hospitality, which means addressing questions that Will has spent his career asking.

• How do you make the people you work for, and the people you serve, feel seen and valued?
• How do you give them a sense of belonging?
• How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves?
• How do you make them feel welcome?

Will founded the Welcome Conference with his friend Anthony Rudolph as a place where like-minded passionate people could form a community, trade ideas, and inspire one another. In doing so it would evolve their craft.

When you create a “hospitality first” culture, everything about your business improves.

Hospitality is a selfish pleasure. It feels great to make other people feel good.

Chapter 2: Making Magic in a World That Could Use More of It

People will forget what you do, they’ll forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.

As a young boy, Will’s father took him to dinner at the Four Seasons, and 30 years later he still hasn’t forgotten how the Four Seasons made him feel.

We have an opportunity, a responsibility, to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.

Chapter 3: The Extraordinary Power of Intention

Will’s dad was the president of Restaurant Associates.

Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters.

To do something with intentionality means to do it thoughtfully, with clear purpose, and an eye on the desired result.

Will’s life goals at the age of 13:

1. Study restaurant management at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration
2. Open his own restaurant in New York City
3. Marry Cindy Crawford

Chapter 4: Lessons in Enlightened Hospitality

Two things happen when the best leaders walk into a room. The people who work for them straighten up a little bit, and they smile.

Will recommends this book: Setting the Table by Danny Meyers.

Enthusiasm is Contagious

All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.

Let your energy impact the people you are talking to, as opposed to the other way around.

Language Creates Culture

Make the charitable assumption. A reminder to assume the best of people even when, especially when, they aren’t behaving well. A concept from Setting the Table by Danny Meyers.

Instead of jumping on someone who is late for a shift. Make the charitable assumption and ask, “You’re late, is everything okay?”

Maybe the person is being dismissive because a loved one is ill. Maybe this person needs more love and more hospitality than anyone in the room.

When you start focusing on extending the charitable assumption to the people around you, you find yourself giving it to yourself a bit more as well.

Chapter 5: Restaurant-Smart vs. Corporate-Smart

In restaurant-smart companies, team members have more autonomy and creative latitude. Because they tend to feel a greater sense of ownership, they give more of themselves to the job. There aren’t a lot of rules and systems getting in the way of human connection. But those restaurants tend not to have a lot of corporate support or oversight, the systems that make great businesses.

Corporate-smart companies have all the back-end systems and controls like accounting, purchasing, and human resources that are needed to make them great businesses. They are often more profitable as a result. Systems are controls, and the more you take away control from the people on the ground, the less creative they can be. The guests can feel that.

Restaurant-smart companies can be great businesses, and corporate-smart companies can deliver great hospitality, but their priorities are different in ways that fundamentally affect the guest experience.

Trust the Process

There are so many things you won’t learn if you skip steps. You must trust the process when growing in your career.

The right way to do things starts with how you polish a wine glass.

There is no replacement for learning a system from the ground up.

Sometimes Control Stifles Creativity

At what point do you need to trade some control in favor of trusting the people on the ground?

In too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information.

Taken too far, corporate-smart can be restaurant-dumb.

Find the Balance Between Control and Creativity

Creativity is the main ingredient in striking a true balance between restaurant-smart and corporate-smart.

The Rule of 95/5

Will was responsible for an ice cream cart at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. He tells the story about spending extra on extraordinarily well-designed and completely unique blue spoons. He says they were also preposterously expensive but he had to have them. It’s a neat story but hard to summarize, I suggest reading this part for yourself.

He managed 95% of his budget aggressively and splurged on the last five percent for the blue spoons. He had earned the right to splurge on the blue spoons. He believed it was the one small detail that would dramatically transform the experience of getting an ice cream at the cart.

The rule of 95/5 is “manage 95% of your business down to the penny, and spend the last 5% foolishly.”

Chapter 6: Pursuing a True Partnership

No matter how amazing a chef is, I don’t want to work for one. It has got to be a partnership, I can’t work with someone who doesn’t respect what we are doing in the dining room.

Run toward what you want instead of running away from what you don’t want.

Chapter 7: Setting Expectations

Invite Your Team Along

What the team at Eleven Madison Park needed.

The team needed to be brought along. They needed to feel seen and appreciated, they needed expectations to be clearly laid out and explained, they needed discipline to be consistent, they needed to feel like vital and important parts of an exciting sea change, not obstacles to making it happen.

From a management perspective, we needed to return to first principles. At Union Square Hospitality Group, the first principle is to take care of one another.

Leaders Listen

Don’t cannonball, ease into the pool.

No matter how talented you are, or how much you have to add, give yourself time to understand the organization before you try to impact it.

Time spent goes a long way. Sitting down with people shows them you care about what they think and how they feel. It makes it much easier for them to trust that you have their best interests in mind.

Find the Hidden Treasures

A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be.

Keep Emotions Out of Criticism

If you correct an employee in front of their colleagues they will never forgive you. Issue the same correction in private and it’s a different exchange.

Whether criticism or praise, it is a leader’s job to give their team feedback all the time.

Every person on the team should be hearing more about what they did well, than what they could do better. Otherwise, they will feel deflated and unmotivated.

If you can’t find more compliments to deliver than criticism, that’s a failure in leadership.

Consistency is one of the most important and underrated aspects of being a leader. A person can’t feel safe at work if they are apprehensive about what version of their manager they will encounter on any given day.

When you mess up, apologize. There is an inherent intensity that comes with being passionate about what you do. On occasion, that intensity can get the better of you.

Thirty Minutes a Day Can Transform a Culture

When initiating change, Will looks for the best lever. Whatever will allow him to transmit the most force with the least amount of energy. He says there is no better lever than a daily 30-minute meeting with your team. Most restaurants hold a daily meeting before service, called lineup or pre-meal.

The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

A good manager makes sure everyone knows what they have to do, and then makes sure they have done it.

A huge part of leadership is taking the time to tell your team why they are doing what they are doing.

Will used the daily meetings to inspire and uplift the team, and to remind them what they were striving for. It was a time to celebrate the wins.

Set Them Up to Succeed

Employees who aren’t succeeding tend to fall into two camps; the ones who aren’t trying, and the ones who are. The end result may be similar, but the two need to be handled differently. You have to move heaven and earth to help the people who are trying.

Go too fast and you will end up slowing the whole restaurant down.

One of the manager’s biggest responsibilities is to make sure the people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed. Be sure they feel confident and know what they need to know.

Chapter 8: Breaking Rules and Building a Team

Before working for EMP, Will did a short training at The Modern.

Inexperience can enable you to look critically at what is happening. 

The only thing that matters is the guest experience. Does a rule bring us closer to our ultimate goal, connecting with people, or does it take us further from the goal?

When you ask “Why do we do it this way?” And the only answer is “Because that is how it’s always been done.” That rule deserves another look. Knowing less is often an opportunity to do more.

EMP sends customers home with a jar of granola at the end of each meal. It was an intentionally humble final touch.

In restaurants, and in all customer service professions, the goal is to connect with people. Hospitality means breaking down barriers, not putting them up. Do whatever you need to do to connect with the people you are serving.

Hire the Person, Not the Resume

If you want to make any meaningful change, you have to surround yourself with a great team.

Everyone hired at EMP started by working as a kitchen server, running food from the kitchen to the dining room. They started at the lowest position in the restaurant. This helped them weed out people who might not be a good fit. Even people who used to be general managers at other restaurants.

Every Hire Sends a Message

When you are hiring, you are hiring not only the people who are going to represent and support you, but the people who are going to represent and support the people already working for you.

Morale is fickle and even one individual can have an outsized and asymmetrical impact on the team, in either direction.

If you hire someone lazy, your best team members will be punished for their excellence.

When you hire, ask yourself if this person has the potential to be one of the top two or three on the team.

Will waited for a few positions to be open and hired 2-4 people to start at the same time. This allowed them to start excited as a group instead of one by one and being discouraged by a bad culture.

Make it Cool to Care

As you grow up, you realize the people getting the most out of their lives are the ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves. The people who allow themselves to be passionate, open, and vulnerable. The ones who approach everything they love at full throttle with curiosity, delight, and unguarded enthusiasm.

When you find a group that cares about the same things you care about, you don’t have to hide your passions.

Chapter 9: Working with Purpose, on Purpose

If your business is involved in making people happy, you can’t be good at it if you don’t care what people think.

If you want to make an impact, you need to have a point of view. You can’t try to be all things to all people.

Criticism offers you an opportunity to have your perspective challenged, or to at least grow by truly considering it. The end game is not the point as much as the process, you grow when you engage with another perspective.

Articulate Your Intentions

Intentionality is important. You must know what you are trying to do and make sure everything you do is in service to that goal.

Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.

Strategy is for Everyone

Four words took center stage in articulating their strategy and culture.

1. Education
2. Passion
3. Excellence
4. Hospitality

Choose Conflicting Goals

Leaders should choose conflicting goals. For example, Southwest Airlines set the goals of being the lowest-cost airline in America and being number one in customer and employee satisfaction.

Having multiple conflicting goals forces you to innovate.

There is an inherent friction between hospitality and excellence. They would need to explore that contradiction and embrace it.

Know Why Your Work is Important

Hospitality elevates service for the person receiving it and for the person delivering it.

Serving people can feel demeaning unless you first acknowledge the importance of the work, and the impact you can have on others when doing it.

Will has had bad days and weeks like everyone else, but he has always been able to say “I can’t imagine doing anything else.” This is because he has always been able to tap into what is important about his job.

If someone thinks their work doesn’t matter, it is usually because they haven’t dug deep enough to recognize the importance of the role they play.

This is the difference between coming to work to do a job, and coming to work to be a part of something bigger than yourself.

Without exception, no matter what you do, you can make a difference in someone’s life. You must be able to name for yourself why your work matters.

Chapter 10: Creating a Culture of Collaboration

Choose Worthy Rivals

In his book Infinite Game, Simon Sinek writes about choosing a worthy rival, another company that does one or more things better than you. Whose strengths reveal your weaknesses and set you on a path of constant improvement.

Reading this made Will think of a dinner he ate at Per Se by Thomas Keller in late 2006. This is one of the best restaurants in the world and his meal was one of the best he had ever had. However, the coffee at the end of the meal was just “okay” and nothing special. It stood out as average because of how incredible the rest of the meal was. This ultimately led him to put Jim Betts in charge of the coffee program at EMP.

Tap Into Their Passions – Then Give Them the Keys

After his meal at Per Se, Will wrote in his notebook that he would put Jim in charge of the coffee program. With that, the “ownership program” of EMP was born.

Success comes in cans, failure comes in cants.

Next, he wanted to improve their cocktail program and he put Leo Robitschek in charge, who is now one of the world’s foremost mixologists.

After these changes, an after-dinner coffee at EMP went from being a “just fine” bulk-ordered afterthought to an exquisitely crafted educational and theatrical experience.

Find the Win/Win/Win

The ownership programs at EMP gave motivated creative people a project to engage with while they gained their stripes. It became a fantastic mentoring program.

Participation in the ownership program was on a volunteer basis. People didn’t need to start out an expert, all they asked is that they be interested, curious, and have the first inkling of passion.

“It Might Not Work” Is a Terrible Reason Not to Try

Refusing to delegate because it might take too long to train someone will only get in the way of your own growth.

Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they are ready. Take a chance and that person will almost always work extra hard to prove you right.

Let Them Lead

The most important moment of leadership each day in a restaurant is the pre-meal meeting.

Public speaking is a leadership skill. Let everyone take a turn leading the pre-meal meeting.

Being able to communicate your own excitement is a powerful way to engage the people who work for and with you, and to infect them with energy and a sense of purpose.

A lot of good comes from empowering the most junior staff members.

Giving the team more responsibility than they expected had an amazing impact. The more they taught, the more they understood. The more they lead, the more they started acting like leaders.

Listen to Every Idea

There is a better way to do everything.

Make sure your team knows that your doors are always open to ideas.

There is often a brilliant idea right behind a bad one.

Excellence is the Culmination of Thousands of Details Executed Perfectly

Only at EMP did Will recognize his fanatical attention to detail as a superpower.

It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly.

The aggregation of marginal gains. A small improvement in a lot of areas. If you improve everything by 1%, you get a significant increase when you combine them. Will uses British cycling coach Sir David John Brailsford’s coaching philosophy as an example.

Perfection as an overall goal is overwhelming and unobtainable, but they were going to get as close as they could.

Chapter 11: Pushing Toward Excellence

Excellence is the culmination of thousands of details executed perfectly.

The Littlest Things Matter

At the very beginning and very end of a meal, time seems to slow down. During these times the guest has a heightened sensitivity to any delay. Here he tells a fascinating story about how they developed hand signals to make water delivery to the table more efficient.

EMP established traffic patterns in the restaurant for the staff. They were imperceptible to the guests but made movement more efficient. The goal was ballet, not football. This eliminated the need for verbal queues like “behind” “corner” etc.

The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

Precision in the smallest details translates to precision in the bigger ones. The people setting the tables were trained to place each plate with the label on the bottom side facing the top. This way if guests lifted up the plate to see who made them, the name would be facing them. This set the tone for how they would do everything throughout the course of dinner service.

People usually want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with.

Chapter 12: Relationships Are Simple. Simple is Hard.

Learn Their Tough-Love Language

Company cultures based on abuse, harassment, and manipulation are not only awful and unethical, but also unstable and inefficient.

Managing staff boils down to two things. How you praise people and how your criticize them.

Praise is the more important of the two.

You cannot establish any standard of excellence without criticism. A thoughtful approach to how you correct people must be apart of your culture.

Sarcasm is always the wrong medium for a serious communication. It demeans the person who is receiving the criticism, the message you are delivering, and you.

There is no better way to show someone you care than by being willing to offer them a correction. It is the purest expression of putting someone else’s needs above your own.

Praise is affirmation but criticism is investment.

If your response to criticism is consistently defensive, if you always push back or insist on justifying your mistakes, people will eventually stop coming to you with criticism. You’ve made it too unpleasant for them to continue, they will stop investing in you and you will stop growing.

Hire slow, fire fast – but not too fast.

There is tremendous power in vulnerability.

Create Your Own Traditions

No aspect of your business should be off-limits to reevaluation.

If you don’t create room for the people who work for you to feel seen and heard in a team setting, they will never be fully known by the people around them.

The secret to happiness is always having something to look forward to.

Chapter 13: Leveraging Affirmation

Persistence and Determination Alone Are Omnipotent

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” – President Calvin Coolidge

Will has this quote on a plaque hanging above his desk. It was a gift from his dad and is his dad’s favorite quote.

Chapter 14: Restoring Balance

Slow Down to Speed Up

I can only be authentic, inspirational, and restorative if I buy back the time to restore myself.

If adding another element to the experience means you will do everything a little less well, walk it back and do less.

Do less and do it well.

Touch the Lapel

Being able to ask for help is a display of strength and confidence. It shows an understanding of your abilities and an awareness of what is happening around you. People who refuse to ask for help, who believe they can handle everything on their own, are deceiving themselves and doing a disservice to those around them.

The team made a crucial recommitment to balance by slowing down, learning to take a few deep breaths, and finding ways to offer and ask for help. They systemized it which stripped the stigma from it.

Chapter 15: The Best Offense is Offense

There is no more difficult moment to be the head of a business than when there has been a massive disappointment.

Raindrops Make Oceans

Uncertainty is scary. Though it is easy to panic in the face of adversity, creativity is the better solution.

Managing expenses is playing defense.

Adversity is a terrible thing to waste.

The rule about delivering desserts is “low and slow.” Carry desserts to the table at eye level and walk slowly so people at other tables can see them.

EMP developed a rolling dessert cart that they brought to the table at the end of a meal. People could order and take the dessert right from the cart without waiting.

Eleven Madison Park earned its fourth star from the New York Times on August 11, 2009. This was awarded by restaurant critic Frank Bruni in the article “Eleven Madison Park Makes a Daring Rise to the Top.”

Chapter 16: Earning Informality

Informality is something you earn.

Being Present

Being present is caring so much about what you are doing that you stop caring about everything you need to do next.

After they mastered excellence, they determined to double down on relationships. For the next year, their main focus was on being present. They wanted to give people more warmth and connection than they expected.

They were now in the business of human connection.

Chapter 17: Learning to Be Unreasonable

If you don’t have the courage to state a goal out loud, you’ll never achieve it.

When you’ve surrounded yourself with talented people, there is nothing more powerful than a collective decision. If this group decides to accomplish a goal, they would do it no matter how far fetched or difficult it was.

The team at EMP set a goal to become the number one restaurant in the world.

Reasonable vs. Unreasonable

“The opposite of a good idea should also be a good idea.” – Rory Sutherland

Quote source: Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

That is why the idea of unreasonable hospitality is so compelling. Being reasonable is not how they would become the number one restaurant in the world.

Hospitality Isn’t a Transaction

If you explain the why, along with the what, you’ll be surprised at how many impossible ideas your team can bring to life.

EMP eliminated the welcome podium and began greeting guests and welcoming them by name. Every night, the Maître d’ would search the names on the reservation list to find out what they looked like so that they could recognize them when they walked in and greet them by name. They created a cheat sheet with photos of each seating.

A leader doesn’t have to know the details of every plan when they have faith in the people who work for them.

Hospitality is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

It is impossible to get a reservation at Rao’s in New York. They don’t take reservations and only a select few people are allowed to eat there if invited by someone who “owns” a table.

Inspired by Rao’s, EMP somewhat eliminated the menu and developed a new minimalist menu with a conversation style of ordering. It’s hard to explain without reading the book, but there are a couple of articles on Eater and The New York Times that explain it.

What’s the Hospitality Solution?

This blog post Eleven Madison Park: The Hospitality Solution, does an excellent job of explaining and summarizing EMP’s hospitality solution. I recommend reading this if you want more information and are not going to read the book.

Chapter 18: Improvisational Hospitality

Four guests at the restaurant one day were discussing that they didn’t get a chance to try a famous New York street hotdog. Will overheard them and ran out to buy a hotdog from a Sabrett Cart. He had the chef slice and plate the hotdog and brought it to their table as a surprise.

Find the Legend

EMP hired their first official “Dreamweaver” to create legendary moments for guests such as the hotdog story. See this article Eleven Madison Park: Systematic Legend Creation for further reading on how they accomplished this.

Googling guests so they could greet them by name became an important pipeline for creating legends for guests.

They wanted to give people a memory so good that it enabled them to relive the experience with them over and over in the future. The true gift was the story. The story is what makes a legend a legend.

Create a Took Kit

Simple pattern recognition. Identify moments that recur in your business and build a toolkit that your team can deploy without much effort. Brainstorm materials that would be useful to have available. Organize those materials so staff can readily access them. Empower your staff to use them. Do that, and you have systemized improvisational hospitality.

They created “Plus One” cards with answers to frequently asked questions. They contained information about who made their plates, who did the floral arrangements, etc. If a guest asked a question or inspected a plate, they brought them a “plus one” card that gave them more information.

They bought tickets to the observation deck of the Empire State Building to give to tourists excited to be in New York.

Prepare for recurring moments in advance, and the staff doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every night. They just have to listen and make it happen.

This is bespoke hospitality.

The value of a gift isn’t about what went into giving it, but how the person receiving it feels.

Opportunities for Hospitality Exist in Every Business

People often confuse hospitality with luxury. Luxury means just giving more, hospitality means being more thoughtful.

Gifts are a way to tell people you saw, heard, and recognized them. A gift tells them you cared enough to listen and do something with what you heard. A gift transforms an interaction taking it from transactional to relational. There is no better way than a gift to demonstrate that someone is more than a customer.

Chapter 19: Scaling a Culture

Nobody knows what they’re doing before they do it.

Growth happens outside of your comfort zone.

Creativity is a Practice

Creativity is an active process, not a passive one. Creativity is not limited to geniuses.

Will says he spent an unreasonable amount of time searching for the perfect coffee pot. He says he found the perfect one and it was worth every minute.

Jump-start the Culture

As you grow, you can’t lose the very thing that gave you the opportunity to grow.

When you consider expanding, you have to first identify what makes your culture unique and decide in advance to protect whatever that is.

Leaders Say Sorry

There is such power when a leader can admit to their mistakes and apologize for them. The idea that you are not going to make any errors is criminally stupid.

Holding yourself accountable publicly strengthens the bond between you and your team.

Sometimes, the best time to promote people is before they are ready.

If you call your team your family, you need to invest in them and give them opportunities to grow with you and your organization.

Chapter 20: Back to Basics

Run toward what you want instead of running away from what you don’t want.

Start with what you want to achieve instead of limiting yourself to what is realistic or sustainable.

His compulsive attention to detail is one of his superpowers, but that tendency means he is always walking a tightrope between the desire to guarantee excellence by controlling everything and empowering and trusting his team.

The two qualities of control and trust are not friends. It is important to manage the tension between these two qualities.

Serve What You Want to Receive

During a 15-course meal, they were interrupting diners 90 times over the entirety of the meal. That was not genuine hospitality.

Serve only what you want to serve and you are showing off. Serve only what you think other people want, and you are pandering. Serve what you genuinely want to receive and there will be authenticity to the experience.

Return to First Principles

They returned to this simple elegant phrase as a reminder of who they were. This was the goal: to be the most delicious and gracious restaurant in the world.

Doing what is right isn’t always best for you in the short-term.

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