Last week, I listened to Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table book. Meyer is a New York City restaurateur who owns many restaurants and businesses, including Shake Shack, Gramercy Tavern, Cafe 2, Terrace 5 at MoMA, and more. It was interesting listening to someone who comes from a domain that is so far from my domain. But is it that far? What can I learn and adopt from his perspective? Here are a few thoughts I had while reading.
- Stakeholders prioritization – Meyer prioritizes the stakeholders in the following way –
- Employees
- Customers
- Community
- Suppliers
- Investors
This is not a common prioritization. I believe one can reason about almost every order, and that’s okay as long as we are aware of it and can explain it. How many of us figured it out for ourselves? For our companies?
- ABCD – Always Be Connecting the Dots –
“Dots are information. The more information you collect, the more frequently you can make meaningful connections that can make other people feel good and give you an edge in business. Using whatever information I’ve collected to gather guests together in a spirit of shared experience is what I call connecting the dots. If I don’t turn over the rocks, I won’t see the dots. If I don’t collect the dots, I can’t connect the dots. […] The information is there. You just have to choose to look.
I believe this is true in two ways: for our team members and co-workers, there are many hints around us about whether they are happy and satisfied and how they perceive the product, the company, etc.; and for our clients, what jobs are they looking to get done using our product, how can we delight them, and what features would be the most helpful? It is not always straightforward, and we must actively look for insights.
- “I can’t expect someone to care about anyone else unless they feel cared for.” – connecting the dots between the previous two sections – as leaders, we want our team to create value that eventually rolls out to the customers. Partially contrary to the restaurant business, customers are sometimes far in time and location. You are building a feature now that will be deployed to a client on the other side of the world in 3 months, half a year, or maybe a few years in extreme cases. If you don’t see and feel the customers directly, it is easier not to care about them. What does it mean not to care about customers as an engineer? Do not think about workflows in the product in a rigorous way, do not take care of edge cases, and do not zoom out of your feature. Would caring for your team make them care about your customers? I cannot tell, but I have witnessed that if you genuinely care about your team, they care more about you and the company, which eventually manifests in caring for customers.
- Family – Meyer’s family (parents, grandparents, wife, and children) are present throughout the book. From his early childhood experiences (documenting what he ate in Paris when he was 7 years old), his father’s business adventures that led him to bankruptcy twice, and how a conversation with his daughter helped him decide on a restaurant location. Reading both Fei-Fei Li’s book and Kara Swisher’s book, I’m always surprised about the major role family and family experience shape each and every one of us.
- The book was published almost 20 years ago, and I found it very enlightening and relevant. Amazing.