#115 Danny Meyer: Hospitality and Humanity

If you reach out to give me a hug and I like you, I'm gonna probably hug you back and then we each get a hug out of the deal. That's called hospitality. Hospitality exists when you believe that the person on the other side of the transaction is on your side, when you trust that they're on your side. It really starts with the people you work with. In business, I think that the first people who need to receive hospitality are the people who work in an organization. Because if when you come to work, you feel like your colleagues are on your side, your boss is on your side, that people genuinely want to see you succeed, that's probably going to bring out the best in you. And so this is what we call the virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality.

I came to be a restaurant generalist really as a reaction to almost backing into being a specific thing called an executive chef. I love cooking. When I decided to get into the restaurant business, it was a time back in the 1980s where it wasn't nearly the acceptable, you know, entrepreneurial career choice that it is today. And there was something in my mind that said, 'My parents are going to totally reject the idea of me being a restaurateur because that's a sketchy job, but they might accept if I say I'm going to be a chef.' Because we had started to see some celebrity chefs. Paul Prudhomme, Wolfgang Puck, I remember Jeremiah Tower from the West Coast. We were reading about Alice Waters with Chez Panisse and I said there's a bunch of people who I could aspire to. And so I got myself trained a little bit in France and Italy and just enough to learn that there's a whole lot of people out there who would be a whole lot better than I as a chef because I just don't think I have ADD, but I definitely did not have what it took to just delve singularly into one topic. And meanwhile, what I loved about getting to run a restaurant as a 27-year-old in New York City was I could dabble in everything. Writing, marketing, tasting food, tasting wine, learning about all those things, teaching those things, hiring decor, welcoming guests all day, seating people. I just really loved all aspects of it. And I knew that if I just did one thing, there's a whole lot of other things I would not have gotten to do.

Well, the location becomes the stage set for the play you're trying to write. And there's a lot about locations that you can change, but there's a lot you cannot change. And you really, really have to understand that the one thing you can never change about a location is where is it and what surrounds it. You can't go knocking down all the buildings around you. You can't go building buildings where there aren't any. You know, if you want greenery outdoors, tough luck if you're on the wrong street in New York City. So, it's really important to understand what is the location saying, how did people get there? How did they feel when they were there? What were they doing before they came to you? And I really have always looked at restaurant spaces the way a winemaker looks at a vineyard, which is that there is a terroir and the terroir is really in charge. So for example if you're a great winemaker in France you don't wait to read the Wine Spectator to tell you what grapes are in fashion today. You listen to the soil which says, 'Guess what? We're in Burgundy and Pinot Noir grows really, really well here. And if you want white, Chardonnay happens to grow really well here, too. But don't try Syrah because it doesn't work.' If you go to Bordeaux, don't try Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, because they're not going to work. And so the same exact thing happens with restaurant spaces. And if you're really observant, the space will tell you exactly what it wants to be. And sometimes what the space says is don't plant anything here. This place should not be a restaurant. And that happens actually more than not. You wouldn't believe how many times I've looked at restaurant spaces. And the first question I ask myself is, would I want this even if it were for free? And guess what? 98% of the time the answer is no. Now, I got to negotiate to get a deal because, you know, most restaurant leases are very very long leases, 10, 15, 20 years. And so, you're signing up, you're making a big commitment. And again, I'll make another analogy with winemaking. When a winemaker commits to growing a grape in a certain vineyard, they're actually making a 10-year commitment because most vines don't become productive with really good grapes for at least 10 years. So, there's a lot we have in common. There's a reason that if you love wine that you know that there are certain vineyards that make good wine year after year after year. And even in the worst vintages, like the weather was really bad, they probably make the best wine of that vintage. It may not be their best wine, but even in a bad vintage, they'll make a good wine. So now, how does that relate to our business? Well, I've always felt that our job is to start by picking the best site. You want to pick a site that has what it takes. It's got bones. It's got a feeling that transports people. That's why people want to go out to eat. It's not just because they don't want to cook or do the dishes. They want to be transported to a social environment. And you ask yourself, can I make something here? Even before you taste anything, can I make something that's going to make people feel good just being here? Like you know that feeling when you walk into a restaurant, you go, 'This place, this is going to make me feel good.' So, you pick your site and now you've got to pick the right grapes. And in our case, the grapes we're trying to pick are the people who work for us. We want to pick people, whether they're cooks or servers or bartenders or maîtres d'. We want to pick people who we believe can thrive in this soil because that soil is our culture. And we got to feed our culture. By the way, you got to take care of your soil. You can't just say, 'Okay, that's our culture. See you in 20 years.' Culture changes all the time and you got to keep it healthy. But the next thing you have to do, you got to train those vines. You got to train them so they grow up. So they don't just grow every which way.

Next thing you have to do is you've got to prune the grapes that shouldn't be there. If you don't prune some of the grapes on the top, they are going to provide so much shade that the grapes down below aren't going to get the nutrients they need. And furthermore, the ground is going to have to feed so many grapes it can't do it all. So sometimes there's people we have to fire and in any great culture you have to do that if you want the rest of the vine to truly thrive. So now you've got great soil, great grapes, well trained, you've pruned it so it's really, really healthy. And the next thing you have to do is pray for good weather, for a good climate. And we have to do that too. You know, if the economy is horrible, if we get a blizzard or a hurricane, whatever could happen, we have got to make the best wine in that particular vintage. And so it goes. And after doing this year after year after year, vintage after vintage, your business will gain a reputation. I have favorite wineries and I kind of feel like they don't know how to make a bad wine because they have so much integrity about what they do that it's always a good wine. I really wish people would say that of our restaurants and it's really hard and it's what we strive for. But you've got to be intentional about it. It all starts with which vineyard did you select.

Yeah. Well, I think we all are in the hospitality business because every one of us is going to succeed when our stakeholders are rooting for our success. And it's going to be a whole lot harder to succeed if people are rooting against our success. So, kind of human nature. If you reach out to give me a hug and I like you, I'm going to probably hug you back and then we each get a hug out of the deal. That's called hospitality. Hospitality exists when you believe that the person on the other side of the transaction is on your side. When you trust that they're on your side, it really starts with the people you work with. In business, I think that the first people who need to receive hospitality are the people who work in an organization because if when you come to work you feel like your colleagues are on your side, your boss is on your side, that people genuinely want to see you succeed, that's probably going to bring out the best in you and then you're probably going to do even better things for your customers. And if your customers believe you're on their side and you do great things for your customers, they're going to probably come back for more because it feels good to do business with you. And the same thing goes for your community. When your community sees that you are doing good things for the community, your community is going to root for your success. And then come your suppliers. Like in my business, we always want to get the best fruit, the best fish, the best vegetables, the best wines, the best prices. Our suppliers are going to take exactly as much interest in us as they believe we're taking in them. And when they know we're on their side, they're going to want to see us succeed. It's just human nature. And that leaves us with our investors. And if you got a staff that is all out to win and you've got customers that are your biggest fans and they can't wait to come see you do it again and your community is rooting for you and your suppliers want you to have the best, do you not believe that you're going to have more left over for your investors than the next guy? And by the way, if you do have more leftover, also known as profit, those investors are going to probably end up doing even better things for your employees. They're going to want to invest in more of your growth. And every time you grow, people on your team are going to get promotions and raises. And so this is what we call the virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality.

I think you can see where this works in organizations of all stripes. One of my favorite professional moments was being invited to speak to the National Governors Association, which is a bipartisan group. It's all governors. They wanted to talk about the power of hospitality in government. I was nervous because I was going like, 'What the heck does a restaurant guy have to do talking to these people?' And what you learn is that governors run an organization just like we do in business. They have a staff who works for them. Their customers are probably the taxpayer. They have lots and lots and lots of suppliers. They have stakeholders just like the rest of us. And they need, just like the rest of us, they need their stakeholders rooting for their success when they deliver the goods, which all starts with how does it feel to work there? What is the working environment like? If you have a winning culture at work, I promise you that the voters are going to have a better experience being on the receiving end.

Well, culture is a language. It's almost like culture is the brick, but language is the mortar. And it's a common language that actually drives a culture forward. And you see this in any culture you know. You see it in religions, fraternities, you see it in sports teams, you see it in families, you see it in businesses. And what the language does is two things. It clarifies what we intend to do.

And it creates a sense of belonging because we all know what this means. I mean, I've seen this when our kids were younger and they went to summer camp. There were languages at these camps or languages within the cabins of the camp and it could be language via a song. It could have been language via a chant. And I had no idea what they were doing, but I could see that they felt this bond because they knew what that language was. So here's something I think I've learned along the way. Early on in my career, I would have people say, 'Our culture doesn't feel the same anymore.' I would melt. I feel like, oh my god, we're failing. It doesn't feel the same around here anymore. And I finally realized, well, you're damn right it doesn't feel the same anymore. And the culture isn't the same anymore because culture is not something that wants to be contained or maintained. Culture is like a shark. It's constantly moving or it dies. And if you define culture as the way we do things around here and you're a growing organization, well, of course you have to be doing things differently. You have to do things differently around here. The one thing that must not change is your value system. That's your compass. And north always has to be north and west has to be west and east has to be east. But your culture does have to change. And so the question is how do we do things around here? Well, I better start off by telling people what our values are, because that's what supports our culture, which will change. And I better tell people how we need to behave while we're doing it. That's my job. And I better hire people who say, I want to work in a place where people behave that way. I want to work in a place that has that kind of values. And now I want to work in a place where I can use my heart and my mind to evolve the culture for the purpose that that company exists.

So now you're asking a really important question which is how do you scale culture? And I would say I may have a job for the rest of my life if that's what I'm working at because it's that hard to do. Now in our industry, the most successful person at scaling systems was Ray Kroc. Whether or not you eat at McDonald's, you'd have to say that it's for the first time in the world, somebody could get French fries to taste exactly the same way on every continent of the world. That's not easy to do. Well, what we do will never ever be anywhere close to as large as McDonald's. But I can also bet you that Ray Kroc didn't spend a lot of time thinking about how do you scale a feeling. He was very interested in how do you scale technical systems. We want our French fries, metaphorically, whatever it is we're serving, we want it to taste consistently good. But I'd say maybe even more importantly for us, we want it to feel consistently amazing. We want the human experience, the human exchange. That's our culture. How we do that has to change because as we grow, it becomes more and more about how did we advance our culture? How did we use our growth to advance our culture as opposed to how do we worry that our growth is going to prevent us from maintaining our culture? And the way we do that is to make sure that we're very intentional about who the culture carriers are. What are the emotional skills that we need to promote? Because every time someone gets a promotion, the rest of the organization is watching very carefully and asking, 'So that's who I have to be if I want to get a promotion in this company. That's how I have to behave. That's what kind of values I have to put out there.' And every time we get that wrong, we actually set ourselves back many, many fold.

It's going to sound like second grade stuff because it's really obvious, but I'll tell you one thing. I've been doing this for a long time. And every time we take our eye off these six obvious emotional skills, our batting average goes down quite a bit. We want to get a 100% employee just like our employees want us to be 100% boss. Now, I never get 100 on my test as a boss. I'd be really, really happy to get something in the mid 90s. Believe me, if I could have brought home an A minus on my report card, straight A minuses, my parents would have sure been proud because I didn't do that. But the way we ideally get to 100, 49 of those points are going to be how well someone does the job they do. How good of a cook are you? If you can make the best bowl of pasta I've ever had in my life, you get 49 points. That leaves 51 points if you want to get 100. And the 51 points are all going to have to do with your HQ, your hospitality quotient, which is the degree to which you are happier yourself when you make someone else feel better. Has nothing to do with how good of a pasta cook you are. Has everything to do with what are your motivations behind the amazing technical skills you have. I need them both.

So, here's what the six emotional skills are that we always see at a very high level when someone's got a high HQ. The first one is optimistic kindness. Now, that's kind of a twofer. I can look in someone's eyes and tell you whether they have kind eyes or not because they've been using those eyes their entire life to express emotion. You cannot lie in an interview if you don't have kind eyes. I can see that you have not been smiling for a good deal of your life. I can see that you may worry a lot. I can see you may be angry a lot. But I'm looking for kind optimism. And the reason optimism is important over and above you're being a great cook, I want to know that your actions can make the world better, can make me feel better. Skeptics tend not to thrive in the world of hospitality. I think there's a role for people who are good at managing risk, but that's different than approaching a situation from the outset as that old cartoon character would say, it'll never work. That's not going to probably work. So, kind optimism number one. Number two, curiosity. Can't overstate how important it is. I want people on the team who are not a finished product, who look at every day as an opportunity to learn something new. The kind of people who, you know, in Manhattan, even though they walk to work every day, they find a different block to walk on because they might just learn something new. Tomorrow, they look up at the cornices instead of down at the sidewalk, or they look across the street as opposed to the same side of the street because they just might learn something new. Intellectual curiosity.

Number three, work ethic. I want someone who in addition to learning how to do the job well, cares deeply about doing that job as well as it can be done. These are people who have a very sensitive excellence reflex. People with an excellence reflex see something that could be better and they fix it. They don't just walk right by because it matters to them. And the fourth emotional skill is empathy, which is a sense that you're able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and ask yourself, hey, if that were me, I might want this. And real empathy actually rejects the old golden rule. The old golden rule says, do unto others as you would have done unto you. The hospitality golden rule, which is driven by empathy, says do unto others as you believe they would want done unto them. It's a subtle but very important difference if you try to walk in their shoes. Fifth is self-awareness, which is an understanding that we all have different drives and we all feel different every single day. And I would define self-awareness as understanding my own personal weather report for a given day. Just as the weather is slightly different every single day of our lives, I don't think I've had two exact same weather days in my life, so too is my personal weather report. Some mornings I wake up tired. Some mornings I wake up full of energy. Some mornings I wake up nervous. Some days I wake up like I can go conquer the world. It's important if you're going to be a member of a team to know what your own personal weather report is because you will be either raining on other people or shining on other people or creating humidity for other people. And unless you're aware of where you are, you're going to probably be impacting the rest of your team in ways that you did not intend to. And then sixth is integrity, which is having the judgment to do the right thing even when it may not be in your self-interest and even when no one else is looking and caring about doing the right thing.

So now you go, 'All right, cool. I've got a pretty tough job in my business trying to find someone who's a really, really good pasta maker.' And now you're going to tell me that they made the best pasta in the world and they only get a 49 on their test. And I'm going to say, 'Yep.' Because in addition to making great pasta, I need that person to be friendly, optimistic, curious, have a great work ethic, have empathy for other people, be very self-aware, and have integrity. And you're going to go, 'Good luck.' And I'm going to go, 'That's right.' And wait till you see how our grapes taste when we make wine out of it. It's going to blow your socks off.