People

The Five-Minute Speech You Have Never Given

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Perspective

Jack Welch spent twenty years giving the same five-minute speech. The specifics changed as GE changed, but the structure never did: Here is why the current situation cannot continue. Here is where we are going. Here is how we are...

Why Your Leadership Training Is Not Working

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People

Plato argued he needed fifty years to develop a good leader. Most restaurant operations give it three days — a seminar, a workshop, maybe an online course — and then wonder why nothing changed. The research is consistent: most leadership...

Eight Of Your Ten Cast Members Are Not Giving You Their Best

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Perspective

Twenty percent. That is the share of employees who report giving their very best to their jobs when surveyed across industries and organizations. And that number gets lower, not higher, the longer people have been at the company. Read that...

The Values On Your Wall Are Not Your Values

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Perspective

There is almost no correlation between the words a company posts about its values and the behavior of the people who work there. This finding comes from decades of organizational research — and it holds whether the organization is a...

You Are Managing Your Restaurant With Tunnel Vision

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Perspective

In the late 1990s, John Seely Brown — chief scientist at Xerox PARC — was trying to explain why most computer interfaces exhausted their users. His illustration was simple and brutal. Take two empty toilet paper tubes. Tape them to...

Change Without Transition Is Just Disruption

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Perspective, Product

When you change something in your operation — the menu, the service sequence, the room layout, the hours, the price — you are not just changing a process. You are changing a relationship. The Guest who has been coming to...

Why Your Last Change Initiative Did Not Stick

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance

The evidence on organizational change is consistent across decades and industries: most change initiatives fail. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the execution was incompetent. Because the people who were supposed to implement the change were never convinced...

The Welder Who Didn’t Tell His Supervisor

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance

In the early 1990s, Caterpillar was in the middle of one of the most significant organizational transformations in American manufacturing history. The company had nearly gone bankrupt. It had restructured completely — eliminating its entire centralized management system overnight and...

Your Cast Is Not The Problem. Your System Is.

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Profit

The evidence has been clear for decades: most people problems in organizations are not people problems. They are system problems wearing people's faces. Employees do not generally act against their own organization's interests deliberately. They respond rationally to what they...

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