Perspective

Consent Erosion
by admin|12 July 2026|From The Playbook, Perspective
Every relationship in a restaurant operation runs on consent that was given at a specific moment. A Guest walked in and decided to trust you with an hour of their evening and money they could have spent somewhere else. A...
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The Pattern Is the Same Everywhere
by admin|10 July 2026|Newsletter-Substack, Perspective
Position I read Gartner CIO reports. Not because restaurants are like enterprise IT. Because reading enough cross-domain material reveals the same pattern in every domain. The human and leadership dynamic underneath the domain doesn't change. Only the vocabulary does. That...
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Relational Hospitality
by admin|26 June 2026|From The Playbook, Newsletter-Substack, Perspective
Not a technology. Not a data strategy. Not a luxury hotel concept. A human framework for the independent restaurant operator who wants to understand why their best servers are different from their good ones. Here is the distinction. Unobtrusive Service...
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What Warren Buffett Taught Me About How to Run a Better Restaurant
by admin|26 June 2026|From The Playbook, Newsletter-Substack, Perspective
In 1969, Warren Buffett wrote a line in his partnership letter that most investors have read and almost none have fully applied: "Commitments of less than about $3 million cannot have a real impact on our overall performance." Three million...
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The Advantage You Already Have and Aren’t Using
by admin|25 June 2026|From The Playbook, Newsletter-Substack, Perspective
The large hospitality companies are in crisis. Turnover is catastrophic. Burnout is systemic. Guest experience is declining. The diagnosis from inside those organizations is familiar — better scheduling software, smarter labor algorithms, more efficient procedures. That diagnosis is wrong. It...
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The Five-Minute Speech You Have Never Given
by admin|23 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...
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Eight Of Your Ten Cast Members Are Not Giving You Their Best
by admin|23 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...
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The Values On Your Wall Are Not Your Values
by admin|23 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...
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Your Current Business Design Will Eventually Fail — That Is Not A Prediction, It Is A Guarantee
by admin|23 June 2026|From The Playbook, Perspective, Profit
Three Harvard Business School professors wrote something in 1996 that most operators have never heard and need to read twice: "Outward value migration is inevitable. That is why we can guarantee that your current business design will eventually fail." Not...
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You Are Managing Your Restaurant With Tunnel Vision
by admin|23 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...
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