In 1988, Clayton Christensen watched Digital Equipment Corporation collapse. The business press blamed bad management. Christensen looked at the evidence differently — every other minicomputer company collapsed at the same time. Nobody colluded to fail. Something structural was happening that the data, at the time, could not show. His conclusion became one of the most […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is a fair question. You walk into a restaurant, the host greets you, and within fifteen seconds you are being asked about your evening plans, whether you have been in before, or what brings you in tonight. The conversation feels practiced. It is not personal. It is not impressive. And it is not hospitality. […]