What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

The best interview technique is no technique at all: you simply have enough of a conversation that you can get to know the person a little bit.

Service is black and white; hospitality is color. “Black and white” means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency; “color” means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them. Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection—that’s hospitality.

Hospitality is a selfish pleasure. It feels great to make other people feel good.

Two things happen when the best leaders walk into a room. The people who work for them straighten up a little, making sure that everything’s perfect—and they smile, too.

All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.

Culture:

• Constant, gentle pressure (everyone in the organization should always be improving, getting a little better all the time)

• Athletic hospitality (always looking for a win, whether you were playing offense (making an already great experience even better) or defense (apologizing for and fixing an error))

• Be the swan (all the guest should see was a gracefully curved neck and meticulous white feathers sailing across the pond’s surface—not the webbed feet, churning furiously below, driving the glide.)

• Make the charitable assumption (a reminder to assume the best of people, even when (or perhaps especially when) they weren’t behaving particularly well.)

Cult is short for Culture: A “cult” is what people who work for companies that haven’t invested enough in their cultures tend to call the companies that have.

In restaurant-smart companies, members of the team have more autonomy and creative latitude. Because they tend to 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.

(whatever terrifying statistic you’ve heard about how many restaurants fail in the first year has a lot more to do with the people who open restaurants) Without understanding the business part of the business.

Corporate-smart was all fine and good, but at what point do you need to trade some control in favor of trusting the people on the ground, the people who are connecting in real time with your team and your customers?

In too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority.

“We put our employees first” should mean all employees.

Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want.

Every leader should have someone who feels comfortable telling you when you aren’t acting as the best version of yourself.

“The only way I can take care of all of you as individuals is by always putting the restaurant first.”

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.

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

When More is Not Better

Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. Your team can’t be excellent if you’re not holding them accountable to the standards you’ve set.

In order to become a team, we needed to stop, take a deep breath, and communicate with one another. If that meant using a more basic napkin fold or simplifying the butter presentation so everyone had time to meet, then that was a trade-off I was willing to accept.

We were looking for the kind of person who runs after a stranger on the street to return a dropped scarf, who stops by with a plate of cookies to welcome a new family to the neighborhood, or who offers to help carry a stranger’s heavy stroller up the subway stairs. The kind of truly hospitable person, in other words, who wants to do good things, not for financial gain or some sort of karmic bump, but because the idea of bestowing graciousness upon others makes their own day better.

Culture can’t be taught; it has to be caught.

Morale is fickle, and even one individual can have an outsize and asymmetrical impact on the team, in either direction. Bring in someone who’s optimistic and enthusiastic and really cares, and they can inspire those around them to care more and do better. Hire someone lazy, and it means your best team members will be punished for their excellence, picking up the slack so the overall quality doesn’t drop.

The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won’t be far behind.

Intentionality—knowing what it is you’re trying to do, and making sure everything you do is in service of that goal.

Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.

Leaders should actually go out of their way to choose conflicting goals.

Serving other human beings can feel demeaning, unless you first stop and acknowledge the importance of the work and the impact you can have on others when you’re doing it.

The perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they’re ready.

One of the most important tenets of public speaking, which I follow to this day: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.

Excellence: getting as many details right as you can.

“People can feel perfection.” Maybe people don’t notice every single individual detail, but in aggregate, they’re powerful.

If you’ve corrected a guest because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake.

‘Right is irrelevant’ when serving a customer. (“Absolutely, sir, I’m sorry,” before getting the guest a steak cooked exactly the way he wanted it cooked.) Their perception is reality. “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.

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

People usually want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with.

Company cultures based on abuse and harassment and manipulation are not only awful and unethical, but unstable and inefficient as well. And yet that doesn’t—in fact, it cannot—mean your culture should be 100 percent sweetness and light.

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.

One tough-love language that will never, ever work, and that’s sarcasm. Managers, especially young ones, will sometimes try to shroud criticism in humor because they’re insecure about delivering a rebuke. But sarcasm is always the wrong medium for a serious communication.

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.

Not enough is written about how leaders also need to have the awareness to look down, to see what’s really beneath their feet.

Aren’t we supposed to put others first and attend to them before we attend to ourselves? The answer is no. If you aren’t tending to your own needs, you can’t help those around you.

Adversity is a terrible thing to waste.

I often describe “being present” as caring so much about what you’re doing that you stop caring about everything you need to do next.

The opposite of a good idea should also be a good idea.

Hospitality is a dialogue, not a monologue.

The best of those stories do two things: First, they put you right back in the moment, so that you’re not just recounting the experience, but reliving it. Second, the story itself tells you that while you were having the experience, you were seen and heard.

It isn’t the lavishness of the gift that counts, but its pricelessness.

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

Serve only what you want to serve, and you’re showing off. Serve only what you think other people want, and you’re pandering. Serve what you genuinely want to receive, and there will be authenticity to the experience.

A mission statement’s role, in any organization, is to articulate the non-negotiables.