271: Will Guidara. James Clear. Octavia Butler

Good morning dear friends
 
This community loves learning, loves reading, loves books. You understand that different perspectives create richer possibilities.

You’ll love this list – acclaimed Zimbabwean novelist, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s favourite African novels.

Whilst speaking of African authors, this is one of my favourite quotations.

/strategy
Early in his career, Will Guidara, who in 2017 co-owned Eleven Madison Park when it won ‘World’s Best Restaurant’, was introduced to the concept of ‘restaurant-smart and corporate-smart’.

He explains:
“In restaurant-smart companies, members of the team have more autonomy and creative latitude. Because they feel a greater sense of ownership, they give more of themselves to the job. They can often offer better hospitality because they’re nimble; 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, on the other hand, have all the back-end systems and controls in areas like accounting, purchasing, and human resources that are needed to make them great businesses, and they’re often more profitable as a result. But systems are, by definition, controls—and the more control you take away from the people on the ground, the less creative they can be, and guests can feel that.”

We all experience that tension.

How do we maintain the freedom to act whilst leveraging the power of scale?

Too often, we default to binary solutions. We move power to one side of the equation or the other, ultimately generating lop-sided solutions.

The more powerful approach manages the polarity, mindful of what each part does best.

Use the power of central functions to aggregate, analyse and amplify signals and processes.

Let those closest to the customer decide how to translate them into lived reality.

Guidara gives a great example.

One afternoon, he noted that food costs at a particular restaurant had spiked—two months in a row. He pulled another report. The restaurant was selling a lot of lobster. A third report: lobster prices had soared.
A quick phone-call confirmed lobsters were in short supply, driving up price. A second call to the chef confirmed raising the menu price high enough to recover costs would cost them customers.

(Remember, Harvard’s Frances Frei – there are only four ways to fund customer service.)

Here’s the masterful move. The centre didn’t tell the chef what to do. They provided insight. They leveraged scale AND left space to innovate.

He moved into creative action, removing the lobster off the menu, replacing it with a scallop dish he had ready to go.

Back at the central office, the instruction was simple: “Let everyone else know.”

Bureaucracy didn’t choke creativity. It did the opposite. The systems served the craft.
If lobster sales had gone unabated, the restaurant might have died.
If the accountants redesigned the menu, the restaurant would have died.

Creative, hospitality-led, companies can be supercharged by systems.
Systems can unlock possibilities.
It’s all in the how.

Manage the polarity (Thank you to Nick Christellis who introduced me to this idea more than fifteen years ago).

[Discover more about Guidara’s title-winning leadership here. If you’d like to experience it watch The Bear Season 2, Episode 7 (Forks) and Season 4, Episode 3 (Scallop). Thank you, Enrique López Ponce, for recommending The Bear.]

//self
Guidara’s anecdote took me back to one of my favourite interviews, Tim Ferriss speaking to Atomic Habits guru James Clear.

Clear observes, “If you ask better questions, you can get better answers. Questions are very resilient; they’re very adaptable to the context. That’s different, and perhaps a little bit better, than advice. Advice is brittle and context-dependent. Somebody can have a really good plan, a really good piece of advice to give you, but if it doesn’t fit your context, then it’s actually not great advice for your particular situation, whereas questions are very adaptable.”

Guidara understood with the right data-informed questions, he could unlock greater creativity.

[Thank you, Sanja Gohre for recommending this podcast.]

///soul
adrienne maree brown’s work on emergent strategy took me back to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
These thoughts fit today’s themes.

“All that you touch,
You Change.
All that you Change,
Changes you.”

and

“Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
 All that is given to you or taken from you,
All that you love or hate, need or fear
Will teach you.”

Live life with curiosity.
Change is inevitable.
Systems that control but don’t invite curiosity create chaos.
 
All the best
 
Karl
PS: You can learn about my executive coaching practice [here] and find me on LinkedIn. If you want to strengthen your leadership team’s strategic, communication and reflective powers, I facilitate curated leadership journeys. The details are [here]. Please do share this letter with friends. They can subscribe [here].