The night before taking his LSAT’s, Danny Meyer was at dinner with his extended family stressing not only about the exam but about the bigger issue of becoming a lawyer. His uncle suggested he open a restaurant. At the age of 27, Meyer opened Union Square Café intuiting what evolved into his later-articulated philosophy of enlightened hospitality. I recently finished Danny Meyer’s “Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business” which I bought because I saw it in on a prominent end cap in the bookstore at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. I was on an organized bicycle ride from Albany to the South Street Seaport in New York City and bought the book despite my already full pannier.
I immediately saw the relevance of Meyer's philosophy to the practice of law:
- The question you should ask is how does it feel to dine at my restaurant, not how does it feel to own it?
- Flip the org chart upside down. We are problem solvers. The more imaginatively and generously we solve problems, the better we will succeed. Put your staff first, your customers second, and your investors last.
- Why should someone come back and do business with us? We are all in the commodity business. We like to think our roast chicken is the best, but anyone can buy our cookbook and replicate our result. If your customer doesn’t love the overall experience, why should he come back. Your staff to look people in the eye, remember them, be happy to see them.
- Service should be one size fits all, but hospitality should be one size fits one.
- Nice guys can be brutally completive. You can be a corrective leader by catching your staff doing things right. Make a list of four things you want done better and catch your staff at doing
- Meyer’s father was a restaurateur who went bankrupt twice. Meyer was afraid to open his second restaurant (Grammercy Tavern). When Grammercy Tavern succeeded, Meyer realized that it wasn’t his father’s expansion that caused his bankruptcies. It was his father’s failure to surround himself with people who do things better than he did.
What good book have you read recently?