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.

Will not only transformed a restaurant, but challenged our entire idea of service. The lessons in Unreasonable Hospitality have as much relevance to real estate agents and insurance brokers—even government agencies—as they do for people who work in restaurants and hotels. His thoughts on leadership are as applicable to business-to-consumer companies as they are to business-to-business companies.

Be unreasonable and inspire on! Simon Sinek

When I was young, my dad gave me a paperweight that read, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” That’s what I was thinking about when Daniel and I wrote, “We will be Number One in the world,” on a cocktail napkin.

Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.

I wanted to be number one, but that desire wasn’t just about the award; I wanted to be part of the team that made that impact.

Just before I drifted off to sleep, I smoothed out the napkin and added two more words: “Unreasonable Hospitality.”

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.

What I’d really like to do is let you in on a little secret, one that the truly great professionals in my business know: hospitality is a selfish pleasure. It feels great to make other people feel good.

“People will forget what you do; they’ll forget what you said. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” This quote, often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to the great American writer Maya Angelou, may be the wisest statement about hospitality ever made. Because thirty years later, I still haven’t forgotten how the Four Seasons made me feel.

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.

Richard Coraine would often tell us, “All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.”

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

Randy’s sunny optimism could sometimes stretch the limits of belief. Ask him how his day was going, and he’d say, “You know, man, I’m trying to make today the very best day of my life.” I might have rolled my eyes, but that kind of unwavering positivity turned out to be impossible to resist, largely because Randy believed every bit of what he was saying—and, before long, so did we.

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.

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

Just because a few regulars love an employee doesn’t mean they should be allowed to erode the foundation of everything you’re trying to build.

If you take care of your managers and give them what they need to be successful, you put them in a better position to take care of their teams.

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.

My dad has always said: Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want.

You should never waste an opportunity to gather intel before your first day on the job.

Some of the best advice I ever got about starting in a new organization is: Don’t cannonball. Ease into the pool. I’ve passed this advice on to those joining my own: 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.

You’re not always going to agree with everything you hear, but you’ve got to start by listening.

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

I still give The One Minute Manager to every person I promote. It’s an amazing resource, in particular on how to give feedback. My biggest takeaways were: Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion.

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.

Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. But in reality, you have to make your expectations clear. And your team can’t be excellent if you’re not holding them accountable to the standards you’ve set. You normalize these corrections by making them swiftly, whenever they’re needed.

When you ask, “Why do we do it this way?” and the only answer is “Because that’s how it’s always been done,” that rule deserves another look.

Knowing less is often an opportunity to do 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.

Someone wise once told me, “When you hire, you should ask yourself: Could this person become one of the top two or three on the team? They don’t necessarily have to be all the way there yet, but they should have the potential to be.”

If your business involves making people happy, then you can’t be good at it if you don’t care what people think. The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won’t be far behind.

The endgame isn’t the point as much as the process: you grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again.

It’s 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. And if you’re a leader, you need to encourage everyone on your team to do the same.

“Success comes in cans; failure comes in can’ts.”

The first time someone comes to you with an idea, listen closely, because how you handle it will dictate how they choose to contribute in the future.

Great leaders make leaders. You don’t want to have a hundred keys; you win when you end up with only one—the key to the front door.

Their perception is our reality.

Which means: it doesn’t matter whether the steak is rare or medium rare. If the guest’s perception is that it’s undercooked, the only acceptable response is, “Let me fix it.” And true hospitality means going one step further and doing everything you can to make sure the situation doesn’t repeat itself—in this case, making an internal guest note in our reservations system that this person “orders steak medium rare, but prefers it cooked medium.”

It’s important for me to make clear that “Their perception is our reality” did not apply in scenarios where a guest was being abusive or disrespectful. The customer isn’t always right, and it’s unhealthy for everyone if you don’t have clear and enforced boundaries for yourself and your staff as to what is unacceptable behavior. The line is bright: abuse should not and cannot be tolerated, period.

Drink your best bottle not on your best day but on your worst.

We started with that old chestnut people tell honeymooners: Don’t go to bed angry.

We went so far as to make this a rule, drilled over and over in pre-meal: don’t leave work if you’re harboring feelings of frustration or resentment toward a colleague or the job itself; make sure to talk things through before heading home.

In my experience, people usually want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. Even if neither of them managed to change the other’s mind, at the very least they’d have shown each other respect by taking the time to listen. Even if they didn’t achieve resolution, they’d both feel lighter when they headed off to bed.

Managing staff boils down to two things: how you praise people, and how you criticize them. Praise, I might argue, is the more important of the two. But you cannot establish any standard of excellence without criticism, so a thoughtful approach to how you correct people must be a part of your culture, too.

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.

The people you work with will never be your actual family. That doesn’t mean that you can’t work harder to treat them like family, which may mean tweaking one of the great management sayings out there, which is “Hire slow and fire fast.”

One of my dad’s quotes I love the most is: “The secret to happiness is always having something to look forward to.”

If a distributor compliments you on always getting your orders in on time, ask them to say it again once you’ve gotten the person responsible on the phone. If an investor notes that the reports you send are always timely and detailed and clear, grab the accountant who puts those reports together and pull them into the meeting so they can bask in the praise.

When I was little, my dad gave me one engraved with his favorite quote, from Calvin Coolidge. I had it hanging in my childhood bedroom, then in my college dorm room; I have it still, hanging here above my desk.

It reads: Nothing in this 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.

I can only be authentic and inspirational and restorative if I buy back the time to restore myself. . . . This is not a passive pursuit; it’s active. The things I can control— mindfulness, diet, exercise, attitude, and whom I choose to spend my time with—those things take priority over all others. So when I do raise my hand, I’m armed with the mental fortitude to make sure that my ambition doesn’t undermine the clarity that got me all these killer opportunities in the first place.

Put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others.

Raindrops Make Oceans

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.

There is, by the way, no better way for a leader to figure out why an idea isn’t working—or how it can work better—than to walk a mile in the shoes of the people you’ve charged with implementing that idea.

The true gift, then, wasn’t the street hot dog or the bag full of candy bars; it was the story that made a Legend a legend.

Luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful.

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.

The symmetry of the words themselves appealed, reinforcing that this was a restaurant run by both sides of the wall. The kitchen “makes” food; in the dining room, we were “nice.” (We were so adamant about breaking down the walls that divided us that—as you may have noticed—we didn’t even use the common terms “back of house” and “front of house.” Instead, we always referred to them as “the kitchen” and “the dining room.”) Plus, “make” and “nice” had the same number of letters.

To paraphrase the marketing guru Seth Godin, creativity is a practice. Even great creative minds like Sir Paul McCartney, Godin explains, have a system to help them be creative, to hone their ideas. In McCartney’s case, time pressure, a regular schedule, and being comfortable with using a less-than-perfect word or musical phrase until he came up with a better one were all necessary for him to get to songs that are still beloved, fifty years later. Your practice may be different—and none of us is Paul McCartney—but it’s time we dispel the myth that creativity must be spontaneous and is limited to geniuses. Creativity is an active process, not a passive one.

Maya Angelou famously said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” The more space we gave ourselves to dream, and the more trust we gave one another, the better we got.

I’m always surprised when people spend a fortune on a new project, then skimp on training the people charged with bringing that project to life—a perfect example of what it means to be “penny-wise, pound-foolish.”

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.

Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what’s realistic or sustainable.

Or, as I like to say, don’t ruin a story with the facts. Eventually, you’ll reverse engineer your great idea and figure out what’s possible and cost-effective and all the other boring grown-up stuff. But you should start with what you want to achieve.

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.”