Sunday Reflections - Unreasonable Hospitality: The Art of Human Connection
This week's newsletter is focused on a fantastic podcast interview with Will Guidara.
I loved Will Guidara’s appearance on the "Front Row Seat" podcast, where he discusses his philosophy of “Unreasonable Hospitality”. A renowned restaurateur and author, he emphasizes that true excellence in business starts with prioritizing human connection and relationships over simply perfecting a product or service.
Guidara illustrates this through personal anecdotes from his time at Eleven Madison Park, named the #1 restaurant in the world at one point, and his involvement with "The Bear" TV series.
The discussion also touches upon the nobility of service, the importance of handling negative feedback as an opportunity for growth, and how AI can enhance, rather than replace, the human touch in business.
Insights + Quotes
I. Finding Purpose in Work:
The reason I talk about the nobility of service so much is because I don't care what you do for a living, you need to take the time to articulate for yourself why the work matters, and how you can genuinely impact those around you.
I don't care care how much you like your job, sometimes work sucks, and if you don't know that you're making a real difference, it's impossible to bring your most fully realized self to the work on those difficult days.
II. Excellence and Hospitality: A Productive Tension:
Excellence and Hospitality are not friends. They actually don't go well together. Excellence is about being perfect. Hospitality is about recognizing that human beings are perfectly imperfect. Hospitality is making human beings feel seen.
I believe our success came not in spite of that tension, but because of it. But I do not believe our excellence is the reason we became number one in the world. I think excellence is important, it’s a prerequisite to all the stuff I I talk about, but excellence is table stakes.
Whatever you all do for a living, there's an expectation that you're going to be excellent in pursuit of that. People are paying you for a product. It better be excellent.
We became number one because we made the choice to be as unreasonable in pursuit of people, as everyone else was simply in pursuit of the product they were selling.
III. Handling Adversity:
My dad always says, “Adversity is a terrible thing to waste”. You can't control what life throws at you, but you can control how you react to those moments, and I think it's a beautiful thing because sometimes we glaze over moments of disappointment in an effort to be a cheerleader. I think you need to allow yourself to sit in moments of disappointment and take what you can from them and then move on.
IV. Casting Vision and Empowering Teams:
I believe the same two jobs every leader has every day they go into their business is, one, to tell the team where we we’re going. We're going to be number one. It's going to take us years. We're going to get there through unreasonable hospitality. People crave convicted leadership, they crave direction.
Two, was to invite anyone who wanted to to take a seat at the table with me, such that we could collectively figure out how to get there. People crave a sense of ownership, and so if you can do both of those things. If you can say, hey this not designed by committee, we are going here, but everyone has a voice in helping us figure out how we're going to get there.
If you can carry those two things, I've always found it is nothing short of extraordinary what you can accomplish.
V. Building Relationships:
The only real competitive advantage that exists, at least over the long term, comes through hospitality. Through consistently and generously investing in relationships because relationships take a long time to build, and if you build them in the right way, they take a long time to erode.
VI. The Leader's Role in Service:
“Service is good at companies where leadership is good. Service is bad at companies where leadership is bad.” Leadership is declining, and people are not giving their teams the tools required to succeed, and those tools are either training or inspiration or empowerment or whatever it ends up being. I think when leaders complain that the service in their companies is not good, they need to hold up a mirror because it ultimately starts with them.
Thanks for reading! If you found any of these insights valuable, please share your thoughts in the comments, or share with someone you think would benefit from the newsletter.
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Have a great week!
-Ben