Unreasonable Hospitality | Will Guidara
I saw this book Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara in the book list that Ozan Varol shared and then I also noticed it in the bestseller list of Amazon when I was very close to finishing the book. It is a great book that every business people can find things to apply in their business life. Although Will Guidara has a profession that I am not familiar with, the method he uses will probably fit into almost all businesses.
Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of Eleven Madison Park, a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its majestic room. Eleven years later, EMP was named the best restaurant in the world. How did Guidara pull off this unprecedented transformation? Radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room-and memorable, over-the-top, bespoke hospitality. Let’s see what I highlighted from Will’s book.
In the rise of digital communication and increased demand for remote work, we are left feeling lonelier and more apart than at any other time in recent history. Yet our intense desire to feel a sense of belonging remains-it’s an innate human need. That’s where Unreasonable Hospitality comes.
The greatest restaurants in the world became great by challenging the way we think about food: sourcing, preparation, presentation and, of course, taste. But when Will Guidara set out to make Eleven Madison Park the best restaurant in the world, he had a crazy idea about how to do it: “ What would happen if we approached hospitality with the same passion, attention to detail, and rigor that we bring to our food? “
Most people think of hospitality as something they do. Will thinks about service as an act of service-about how his actions make people feel. And he recognized that if he wanted his frontline teams to obsess about how they made their customers feel, he had to obsess about how he made his employees feel. The two cannot be separated: great service cannot exist without great leadership.
We had a radical idea of what the guest experience could be, and our vision was unlike any other out there. “You’re not being realistic,” someone would invariably tell us, every time we contemplated one of our reinventions. “ You’re being unreasonable. “
That word “ unreasonable “ was meant to shut us down-to end the conversation, as it so often does. Instead, it started one, and became our call to arms. Because no one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable. Serena Williams. Walt Disney. Steve Jobs. Martin Scorsese. Prince. Look across every discipline, in every arena-sports, entertainment, design, technology, finance-you need to be unreasonable to see a world that doesn’t yet exist.
Richard Coraine would often tell us, “ All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm. “
I’m so thankful to have had a leader like Hani at that point in my life; there’s so much I wouldn’t have learned if I had skipped steps. I thought of him often, later in my career, when I was managing young people hungry for more responsibility or a bigger title. Hani hadn’t been doing me a disservice by making me wait; he had been forcing me to strengthen my foundation, a solid base I relied on for years afterward. Waiting didn’t dim my ambition or hamper my progress; it taught me to trust the process -a lesson I would see the wisdom of when I was showing my own staff that the right way to do things starts with how you polish a wineglass.
This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.” It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend.
When someone who worked for me did a task well, I made sure to find a way to hype them up for it, and in front of as many of their colleagues as I could. Receiving praise, especially in front of your peers, is addictive. You always want more.
You must invest as much energy into hiring as you expect the team to invest in their jobs. You cannot expect someone to keep giving all of themselves if you put someone alongside them who isn’t willing to do the same. You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience.
We started with that old chestnut people tell honeymooners: Don’t go to bed angry.
Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment. And this is why it’s so important, no matter where you are in the hierarchy, to be able to graciously receive criticism.
One of my dad’s quotes I love the most is: “ The secret to happiness is always having something to look forward to. “
Jay-Z: “ I believe you can speak things into existence. “ I know this for sure: if you don’t have the courage to state a goal out loud, you’ll never achieve it.
We called our new company Make It Nice, after Daniel’s signature phrase, back when his English was less refined. It had quickly become shorthand within the restaurant for “Pay a little extra attention to this”-whether “this” was a table of friends, or a dish, or even a side-work project. By that point, expectations were so clear, a team member could say, “Make it nice,” to one of their colleagues, and without any further explanation, they would.
Sometimes the best time to promote people is before they are ready. So long as they are hungry, they will work even harder to prove that you made the right decision.
When Dan heard the title of this book, he shared this wildly appropriate quote from Teller, the silent half of the famed magic duo Penn and Teller: “ Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. “
Originally published at https://myhighlightz.blogspot.com.
