Making it Happen: Hospitality

I’ve been a  long time admirer of restaurant and hospitality guru Danny Meyer.  He has successfully created some of NYC’s best restaurants including Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, Blue Smoke and Shake Shack.  Every one of his restaurants has a unique point of view and offers some of my all time personal favorite dining experiences available in NYC.

A few years ago he wrote the book, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business.  At first glance one might think  the book exclusively caters to the restaurant industry, but a few chapters in, it becomes clear that this books speaks to and provides insight for entrepreneurs and business leaders in any industry.

Towards the end of the book he writes about the importance of context when making decisions.  I found his criteria for making these critical choices particularly poignant as I decide how to expand my own business and take on new projects.

The “Yes” Criteria for New Ventures according to Danny Meyer

• An in-depth pro forma analysis convinces that it is a wise and safe investment.
• The opportunity fits and enhances our company’s overall strategic goals and objectives
• The opportunity represents a chance to create a business venture that is perceived as groundbreaking, trailblazing and fresh
• The timing is right for our company’s capacity to grow with excellence, especially in terms of having enough key employees who are themselves and interested and ready to grow
• We believe we have the capacity to be category leaders within whatever niche we are pursuing
• We believe our existing business will benefit and improve by virtue of or notwithstanding our pursuing this new opportunity
• We feel excited and passionate about this idea.  Pursuing it will be an opportunity to learn, grow, and have fun!
• We are excited about doing business in this community
• The context is the right fit.  Our restaurant and our style of doing business will be in harmony with its location

World Building in a Crazy World

Many of you are probably familiar with Jonathan Harris.   He is, in my mind, a genius.  While he has created a number of fantastic projects, he seems to have gotten the most press for We Feel Fine, an interactive exploration of human emotion, which also just recently became the We Feel Fine book.  If you haven’t checked it out, do.

More recently, he created a series of vignettes titled World Building in a Crazy World, which are based on a talk he gave at UCLA as part of the Mobile Media Lecture Series.  When I first came across them, I was in a cozy hotel in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome wrapping up a two week vacation and mildly dreading heading back to NYC.  After reading them, my mind shifted; I wanted to dive back into the projects I was working on and see how I could make them better.  I became “less concerned with how the world is, and more with how the world could and should be.”  As Jonathan sees it, the series is about the current state of the digital world.  As I see it, the vignettes are about life and how to be more conscious of how we live it.

Think about his points.  Soak them in.   Apply them to your life where it feels right.  I did and I’m a better person because of it.

Quotable: Charles Eames

“The details are not the details. They make the product.” -Charles Eames

The Eames.  They were innovative, modern, practical and classic.  Their house was built 60 years ago in the 1949 as part of the Case Study House Program.   It took just one-and-a-half days for eight workers to build the frame from 11 tons of steel and cost just $1 per square foot.

Quotable: A Moveable Feast

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty  feeling and began to be happy, and to make plans.” -Ernest Hemingway

Next weekend I will be on the South Shore of Massachusetts enjoying some of these beauties myself.