Unreasonable Hospitality

BY: WILL GUIDARA

In one line: No matter what your job title or profession is, this book has a lot of actionable insights to improving your day-to-day delivery of excellence–“it’s not about what you do. it’s about how you make people feel.”

1. Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2:
2. Chapter 3 – The Extraordinary Power of Intention:
3. Chapter 4 – Go Above & Beyond:
4. Chapter 5 – Restaurant Smart vs. Corporate Smart:
5. Chapter 6 – Pursuing Partnership:
6. Chapter 7 – Setting Expectations:
7. Chapter 8 – Breaking Rules & Building a Team:
8. Chapter 9 – Working With Purpose on Purpose:
9. Chapter 10 – Creating a Culture of Collaboration:
10. Chapter 11 – Pushing Towards Excellence:
11. Chapter 12 – Relationships Are Simple And Simple Is Hard:
12. Chapter 13 – Leveraging Affirmation:
13. Chapter 14 – Restoring Balance:
14. Chapter 15 – The Best Offense is Offense:
15. Chapter 16 – Earning Informality:
16. Chapter 17 – Learning to be Unreasonable:
17. Chapter 18 – Improvisational Hospitality:
18. Chapter 19 – Scaling a Culture:
19. Chapter 20 – Back to Basics:
20. Ending Credits – Learn to Be the Coach, Not the Best Player:

Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2:

• This book is about how to treat people, listen better, and how to love learning to make others feel good
• MICHELIN STAR: You make something great by challenging the traditional way people think about it
• MICHELIN STAR: Less about what you do, more about how you make people feel
• If you want to get your people to obsess over client service, than you need to obsess over making your employees feel a sense of belonging
• QUESTION: What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
• CULTURE: Focus on connection, graciousness, and making people feel like they belong to a family
• Service is black & white (competence & efficiency), hospitality is color (engaging & authentic connection, bespoke, over the top, unreasonable)
• MICHELIN STAR: People who change the game don’t change it by being reasonable; to create a world that doesn’t exist you need to be unreasonable
• Companies are so focused on product, they have forgotten about people
• Create a culture of hospitality—seen, valued, sense of belonging, something bigger than themselves
• “Hospitality 1st culture”
• QUOTE: “People will forget what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
• MICHELIN STAR: We have a responsibility to make magic in a world that desperately needs more

Chapter 3 – The Extraordinary Power of Intention:

• “Enlightened Hospitality” — (Danny Myer from EMA, Tabla, USQ Tavern) prioritized employees over everything else
• Intention means every decision from the most obviously significant to totally mundane matter, do thoughtfully, with clear purpose
• It’s easier to learn to do things at the high-end than to break bad habits later

Chapter 4 – Go Above & Beyond:

• LEADERSHIP: 2 things happen when the best leaders walk into a room—1) people straighten up a little bit; 2) they smile
• MICHELIN STAR: Seek new ways to make experience seamless, delightful, relaxing
• MICHELIN STAR: Enthusiasm is contagious
• QUOTE: “I’m just trying to make today the best day of my life.” – Anonymous
• CULTURE: Give people trust to develop ownership
• MICHELIN STAR: Language creates culture (things that are constant gentle pressure, repeated and adopted by everyone)
• “Kaizen” – the idea that everyone should always be improving a little bit every day
• Make the charitable assumption (ie: you’re late, is everything okay?; everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about)
• Focus on Why > What

Chapter 5 – Restaurant Smart vs. Corporate Smart:

• CULTURE: The more control you take from people, the less creative people can be; be careful not to create systems that hinder experience
• There’s no replacement for learning a system from the ground up
• Too many organizations are structured with the people at the top having all the authority but no information
• 95-5 rule—manage 95% of your business to the penny and spend the last 5% “foolishly”
• “Over the top” staff parties

Chapter 6 – Pursuing Partnership:

• MICHELIN STAR: Don’t do what’s best for the owners or what’s best for the employees—do what’s best for the company as a whole

Chapter 7 – Setting Expectations:

• MICHELIN STAR: Communicate consistent standards with lots of repetition so everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing and WHY
• Your team can’t be excellent if you don’t hold them to the standards you’ve set; give feedback in private; focus on helping people who are trying and make sure they have what they need to succeed and get rid of those who aren’t
• Employees can’t feel safe if you don’t have consistency as a manager
• LEADERSHIP: Most problems can be avoided with early, clear & drama-free corrections
• BOOK: The One Minute Manager — how to give and receive feedback
• FEEDBACK: Keep emotions out of your criticism & criticize the behavior, not the person + praise in public & with emotion
• LEADERSHIP: A leaders’ responsibility is to identify every members strengths
• One of the hardest things about organizations is that everyone is telling a different story and you’re not always going to agree with everything you hear
• MISSION STATEMENT EXAMPLE: To be the 4-star restaurant for the next generation (EMP; be the Vanguard, target market of informality, younger generation, loud Led Zeppelin)
• MICHELIN STAR: Marry the care & tradition + the excellence & luxury that comes with 4-star dining experience with the surprise & delight and the fun of a more casual experience; we wanted to make fine dining cool
• LEADERSHIP: Every leader needs someone who tells you when you’re not being your best self
• CULTURE: The team needs to be brought along; they need to be seen & appreciated; they need clear expectations, consistent discipline; to feel like vital and important parts of a sea change
• LEADERSHIP: “I am so excited to be here, and I believe in and love _______ (insert your company name) with all my heart. I’m also clear about what my job is, which is to do what’s best for the company, not to do what’s best for you or what’s best for me. More often than not, doing what’s best for the company will include doing what’s best for you. But the only way we can take care of all the individuals is by putting the business first.”

Chapter 8 – Breaking Rules & Building a Team:

• MICHELIN STAR: Choreography is a critical aspect to great service
• MICHELIN STAR: It’s cool to care
• “Cultural bonfire” (hiring people together)
• HIRING: When you decide to hire, ask if they have the potential to be top 2 or 3 on the team and if not, don’t hire
• HIRING: The best way to respect your A players is to surround them with more A players; be as unreasonable in building your team as you are in building the client service
• CULTURE: Morale is fickle. One person can have an asymmetric impact on the team in either direction
• HIRING: Every hire communicates a message
• Need systematized & intentional ways to build connection
• Hospitality means breaking down barriers
• The only thing that matters is what will make your guests happy

Chapter 9 – Working With Purpose on Purpose:

• No matter what you do, it’s hard to excel if you don’t love it
• Roger Martin – “Integrative Thinking” – don’t get stuck choosing conflicting goals (ie: SW Airlines, lowest cost airline along with the best customer & employee ratings)
• QUESTION: What do you want to embody? (Education, passion, hospitality, excellence)
• CULTURE: Huge companies with great culture (Apple, Jet Blue, Nordstrom, SW airlines) all had strategic planning meetings with the entire company to brainstorm how the company could grow; it needs to include the ENTIRE TEAM
• CULTURE: 11 words that describe the culture and what you’re striving for—almost like guiding principles when considering new ideas
• LEADERSHIP: Language is how you give intention to your intuition, share your vision, and create a culture
• MISSION: Knowing what it is you’re trying to do and making sure everything you do is in service of that goal
• FOCUS: Don’t try to be all things to all people (means having a point of view in your creative pursuit); the day you stop reading or receiving criticism is the day you become complacent and irrelevance follows; “invitation to respectfully challenge your opinions”

Chapter 10 – Creating a Culture of Collaboration:

• MICHELIN STAR: Choose a worthy rival—a firm that does things better than you and whose strengths reveal your weaknesses

Chapter 11 – Pushing Towards Excellence:

• MICHELIN STAR: Excellence is the culmination of thousands of details executed perfectly
• Accept your fastidiousness; fanatical attention to detail is a super power; human powered organizations are hard for perfectionists because we always make mistakes
• MICHELIN STAR: If you take every single we’re doing and make a 1% improvement, those are going to add up to massive difference
• MICHELIN STAR: Chase excellence in everything you do
• MICHELIN STAR: Creative Ideas – EMP – the dining room was really busy so they created rules like city traffic grids with two-way and one-way zones, yields at corners, yet these were invisible to guests but improved experience; they used baseball like signals (hand gestures) to signal still or sparkling water when a guest arrived
• MICHELIN STAR: Precision on the little details leads to precision on all the bigger things
• QUOTE: “People can feel perfection.” – Walt Disney
• Create a system that is built on the precision of teamwork
• MICHELIN STAR: Being right is irrelevant, especially when it comes to clients—you do not correct clients to pad your pride—this is the fastest way to lose clients and true fans
• MICHELIN STAR: the essence of what we do is making people feel special, seen, heard—serving our customers, not our egos—being right is irrelevant—their perception is our reality—if the client communicates an issue, the only appropriate response is “LET ME FIX IT.” Saying sorry doesn’t mean you’re wrong either.

Chapter 12 – Relationships Are Simple And Simple Is Hard:

• Drink your best bottle on your worst day
• Partners need to be there when the going gets tough
• CULTURE: When everyone cares about the mission, its easy to forget about caring about each other—turn towards tension and don’t harbor feelings of resentment or issues toward your co-workers
• CULTURE: People want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with
• Try swapping sides and argue the other person’s point of view, or find a third option of compromise
• Sometimes, learn to relinquish your view to your partners if its really important / they are passionate / care more about it
• FEEDBACK: Learn peoples tough love language; some people are sensitive to criticism, others can take it in stride and implement immediately (story: Danny threw food in chefs face after plating wrong, Will yelled in his face with measured words—criticized the behavior, not the person—controlled, not rage; sarcasm never works for serious conversation)
• CULTURE: Work to try and treat your team like family
• You can’t drag your feet on firing someone who’s toxic
• LEADERSHIP: If your tone portrays frustration, apologize to your team members
• LEADERSHIP: Criticism is investment; people will stop investing in you if you insist on defending and justifying yourself
• HIRING: Hire slow, fire fast, but not too fast
• MICHELIN STAR: No aspect of the business is off limits to re-evaluation
• People who are really good at delivering excellent hospitality can have a tendency to be overly sensitive and needy and need lots of reinforcements—take the good with the bad
• MICHELIN STAR: Establish your own traditions – the secret to happiness is always having something to look forward to

Chapter 13 – Leveraging Affirmation:

• Best American Restaurants – The French Laundry, per se, la Bernadin, the inn at little Washington, jean george, EMP
• PEOPLE TO STUDY IN RESTAURANT INDUSTRY: Daniel Balloud, Thomas Keller, Patrick O’Connell
• MICHELIN STAR: Separate organization for evaluating restaurants – “Relais & Chateaux”
• Don’t take credit for other peoples’ work
• QUOTE: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing in this world 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.” – Calvin Coolidge

Chapter 14 – Restoring Balance:

• Go slow to go fast
• I can’t be authentic, inspirational, and restorative if I don’t 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, the people I 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 my clarity that got me all these opportunities in the first place
• You can’t pour from your cup endlessly
• MICHELIN STAR: Encourage people to put on their own oxygen masks first and take breaks so when we do speed up, everyone is ready to go
• IDEA: “DBC” – Deep Breathing Club – a term used in difficult moments to let people know they’re seen, heard, and you have them, and you are there to help, they just need to tell you how
• You need both an easy way for people to ask for help and for people to offer (DBC and touching the lapel)
• Being able to ask for help is a strength. It shows an awareness of your abilities and what’s happening around you.
• CULTURE: People who refuse to ask for help are doing a disservice to everyone. Hospitality is a TEAM sport. If you let your ego get in way of asking for what you need, you’re going to let the whole team down. And the hospitality you’re going to deliver will suffer.

Chapter 15 – The Best Offense is Offense:

• Michelin Guide was created beginning of 20th century as a marketing plan to encourage people to drive around France, with the goal to increase tire sales
• 1 star – very good restaurant, worth a stop
• 2 stars – excellent cooking, deserving of a detour
• 3 stars – exceptional cuisine, important enough to merit a special journey
• Had a secret team of anonymous inspectors
• Only began reviewing New York restaurants in 2005
• LEADERSHIP: Let downs are one of the hardest times to be a leader in a business
• EMP owned Shake Shack which was originally a hot dog station and part of an art installation in 2004 (modeled after the side burger shacks of Danny Meyers youth)
• MICHELIN STAR: Adversity is a terrible thing to waste
• LEADERSHIP: Perspective has an expiration date; unfortunately, when you lose the perspective of the people you’re managing, you tend to lose your empathy for them too; we would all be better leaders if we could tap back into what it feels like to be led but it’s hard to get into that head space
• Keep track of every little cost cutting measure you take and track the details in your journal
• Keep the team engaged at all costs

Chapter 16 – Earning Informality:

• Find the top performers in your industry and study & figure out how you can learn and emulate and become better

Chapter 17 – Learning to be Unreasonable:

• QUOTE: “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”
• QUOTE: “I believe you can speak things into existence.” – Jay Z
• If you won’t say a goal out loud, you will never achieve it
• MISSION: You don’t need to know exactly what an idea means to start pursuing it. All you need, is a sense of what you’re trying to achieve. Start pushing and it will begin to define itself.
• MICHELIN STAR: Hospitality cannot be transactional; it’s a dialogue not a monologue
• QUOTE: “The opposite of a good idea should also be a good idea.” – Rory Sutherland, Behavioral science expert
• MICHELIN STAR: Go to UNREASONABLE lengths to bring your idea to life
• Restaurant – Reo’s (Harlem Italian restaurant); Mamafukus
• MICHELIN STAR: high touch, thoughtful client touches
• MICHELIN STAR: What is the hospitality solution? These will almost always be more difficult to pull off and require more creativity but there’s no replacement for them

Chapter 18 – Improvisational Hospitality:

• MICHELIN STAR: One-off hospitality experiences; unique experiences per guests; give the gift of delight
• MICHELIN STAR: We need to pay attention and better understand people, what they’re interested in, and what could make for great surprises and cool tricks to make their experience unreasonable
• STORY TELLING: The best stories bring you right back into the moment, as if you’re reliving it AND are moments when you are often seen and heard; the true Michelin Star LEGEND is the story that you give people to share and come back to
• MICHELIN STAR: Give your team the Michelin Star experience as well; if they haven’t received the best you have to offer how can they deliver it?
• MICHELIN STAR IDEA: “Dreamweaver” – someone responsible for specifically carrying out unreasonable hospitality
• MICHELIN STAR: Pattern Recognition – Identify moments that recur in the business and build a toolkit your team can deploy without too much effort. Brainstorm materials to have on hand and would be useful to deliver a better experience; you don’t want them to be expected, outdated, or formulaic
• MICHELIN STAR: gifts aren’t about what you give, it’s about how it makes someone feel
• MICHELIN STAR: Luxury and hospitality are not the same; luxury means just giving more while hospitality means doing something thoughtful
• MICHELIN STAR: Gifts can take clients from transactional to relational
• MICHELIN STAR: it only takes one LEGENDARY gift to turn someone into a lifelong client

Chapter 19 – Scaling a Culture:

• No one knows what they’re doing before they do it
• MICHELIN STAR: The biggest, scariest, most impossible seeming accomplishments start with a simple commitment to do them; you need to have faith in yourself that you will figure it out
• HIRING/TALENT/CULTURE: Promote people before they’re ready and let them get down the mountain on their ass or on their skis
• Creativity is a practice
• QUOTE: “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” – Maya Angelou
• MICHELIN STAR: The more space we gave ourselves to dream and the more trust we had in each other, the better we got
• QUOTE: “People can feel perfection.” – Walt Disney
• CULTURE: The culture depends on the people that bring it to life every day—if you get that part right, everything else falls into place
• CULTURE: If you want to bring a new product or service to life, you need to invest in training the people who will bring it to life—don’t be penny wise and pound foolish (should include classroom training and stodging)
• MICHELIN STAR: Every company should spend a few weeks committing their core values to paper
• LEADERSHIP: Leaders say sorry
• CULTURE: A solid culture can hold up to some wear of abuse before it starts to show—a steady drip erodes the rock over time

Chapter 20 – Back to Basics:

• The Best in the World – acknowledges the one making the largest impact on the industry as a whole. The one that is changing the conversation and charting a nee course for everyone
• MICHELIN STAR LANGUAGE: Endless reinvention
• MICHELIN STAR LANGUAGE: Nobility of Service
• MICHELIN STAR: How you make your clients feel matters as much, if not more than what you serve them
• 50 best restaurants / Michelin Impact — The friendly competition and exchange of ideas pushed the entire industry forward
• MICHELIN STAR: New ideas – people get caught up in whats “practical” way too early in the process; start with what you want to achieve instead of limiting to whats realistic or sustainable
• QUOTE: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else can reasonably expect.” – Teller
• MICHELIN STAR: The world needs more magic, we need to aim to create it
• MISSION STATEMENT EXAMPLE: to be a New York restaurant run equally by the kitchen and dining room; to carry ourselves in a way that was genuine and good; learning and leading; to balance the classic and contemporary; the pursuit of reinvention; to create a culture of family and fun;
• MISSION STATEMENT REVAMP EXAMPLE: To be the most delicious and gracious restaurant in the world
• MISSION STATEMENTS: Mission statements need to be clear, simple, and set the non-negotiables, and be easily understood; does your action take you toward or away from that goal
• LEADERSHIP: Control & trust are not friends
• MICHELIN STAR: Serve what you want to receive
• Don’t run away from what you don’t want; run toward what you do want
• MICHELIN STAR: What is the art of hospitality award?
• The pursuit of excellence brought us together; the pursuit of unreasonable hospitality that will bring us to the top
• MICHELIN STAR: Doing what’s “right” is not always great for you in the short-term

Ending Credits – Learn to Be the Coach, Not the Best Player:

SAMPLE: Someone asking for advice because every time he tries to empower his team he sees they’re not doing as good as he would do it, so he quickly jumps in and takes the responsibility back. I don’t know how I can grow because I’m not able to get my team to step up and fill the role that I would and they’re just not as good as I am.

Think about the dynamic between trust and control.

Care a little less about details to care more about people.

Just accept everything won’t be better in the short-term but your business will be better off in the long run.

Are you a player or a coach?

What is your highest and best use?

A winning baseball team can lose their best starting pitcher and win the world series but if you take away the coach, they have no chance.

Stop jumping in and being the best player on the team and focus on being the coach.