Everything You Do Has Meaning
Deming-Aligned Lessons in Leadership from a Master Italian Chef
An unhappy customer tells his friends. The multiplying effect of an unhappy customer is one of those unknown and unknowable figures, and likewise for the multiplying effect of a happy customer, who brings in business.
Deming, W. Edwards. Out of the Crisis, reissue (p. 10). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
A system includes competitors. Efforts by competitors, acting jointly or together, aimed at expanding the market and to meet needs not yet served, contribute to optimization tion for all of them. When the focus of competitors is to provide better service to the customer (e.g., lower costs, protection of the environment), everyone comes out ahead.
W. Edwards Deming. The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (Kindle Locations 487-489). Kindle Edition.
Where is quality made? The answer is, by the top management. The quality of the output of a company can not be better than the quality determined at the top.
W. Edwards Deming. The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (Kindle Locations 217-218). Kindle Edition.
What is a leader? As I use the term here, the job of a leader is to accomplish transformation of his organization. He possesses knowledge, personality, and persuasive power (Ch. 6).
W. Edwards Deming. The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (Kindle Locations 928-929). Kindle Edition.
THE AIM for today’s newsletter is to share with you some strongly Deming-aligned lessons in leadership from Chef Evan Funke, owner and proprietor of three Italian cusine restaurants in California: Funke (Beverly Hills), Felix (Los Angeles), and Mother Wolf (Los Angeles). While we may associate Deming with improvements and leadership in industry or manufacturing settings, the core of his philosophy on management is universal, and moreover actually innate to people who work in services because the distance between provider and customer, like in a restaurant, is very intimate. There’s no room to punt and blame!
In the video above, you will get an inside view how Chef Funke runs his restaurants, not by making edicts, but by working with his staff, demonstrating not only techniques for making high-quality Italian food, but also in the care with which he selects and prepares ingredients (inputs to his system), and in how he chooses to interact with everyone. These are traits that I consider innately Deming, and I’d imagine Funke has never even heard of him.
Pre-Service Meeting
I am a sucker for watching videos about how top restaurants are run behind-the-scenes. They tell you a lot about the mindset of the owner and how they translate their world-view into a dining experience for their guests through their restaurant “system”, from ingredients, to preparation, to the table. There’s a significant high-touch, close-proximity level of interaction at every stage that I’d place at the far-end of Deming’s interdependency map that he describes in The New Economics:
Funke, is no exception. Throughout the video, you see how much he is directly involved with the inputs to his restaurants, like going to a local farmer’s market at the crack of dawn to get the pick of farm-fresh ingredients, the relationships he cultivates with farmers, to how he teaches his staff sophisticated cooking techniques, to the way he communicates with them.
The standout for me, however, is where Chef Funke runs the pre-service staff lineup, the equivalent of a team huddle in corporate settings were they to “ship” every day from 5:00pm to 10:30pm, 11pm on weekends. Check out this clip I’ve teed up to the 13:33 mark:
What I Observed
Every chef worth their weight in salt runs a meeting like this, but I really liked Funke’s leadership style, here. An important thing to keep in mind is that the restaurant is only about nine weeks old at the time, so he is still building the team’s routines and behaviours by modeling and showing instead of delegating and telling. You see this in Deming-led organizations all the time, where leadership is invested in helping employees understand how to interact with each other smoothly, and working on all the ways to optimize the system for this. A big part of this is clear communication regardless of anyone’s role — Funke does this really well. For example, at the end of the meeting, he reminds his staff:
People are going to decide whether or not we're good. It's how they feel when they leave that's going to determine whether or not they're [coming] back.
Everything that you do has meaning. Every single repetition has meaning.
This directly echoes Deming from Out of the Crisis that I quoted above:
An unhappy customer tells his friends. The multiplying effect of an unhappy customer is one of those unknown and unknowable figures, and likewise for the multiplying effect of a happy customer, who brings in business.
Moreover, Funke is communicating to his staff that their success as a top-end restaurant depends on how well they work together, and in this respect nothing is insignificant. He wants them to support one another in the aim to give their guests the highest quality dining experience, and this doesn’t emerge fully formed: it is built gradually and continually as they repeat and improve their routines together.
What do you think?
Have you ever considered applying Deming to a restaurant? Here’s a thought exercise: think back to the restaurants where you had both the best and worst experiences - polar opposites. On a sheet of paper, list all the things that you observed that contributed to each experience. Why did you go? What was the physical space like? How were you greeted? Did you like your table? What was the staff demeanor like? What delighted or disappointed you about the meal? How did your experience end? Did you tell your friends about your honest opinion? To what do you most attribute your opinions? Did you go in with high or low expectations?
Consider all the inputs to your dining experiences and the interactions that needed to be successfully managed. In what ways did you see the presence of Chef Funke’s view that every interaction carries meaning and that nothing is insignificant? Was it a function of cost, ie. was your best experience at an expensive restaurant, or your worst at a cheap one?
There’s an enormous amount you can learn about the disposition of any restaurant’s owners and managers from one dining experience. You can tell if there’s care, especially if things go wrong. They know each experience for a guest could be their last, and it’s important to make them feel that irrespective of dollars spent, they were a VIP that could bring in even more guests in the future. Managing for this vitally important.
Let me know what you think in the comments below - tell me about your best and worst experiences, and what you saw using a Deming view!
Related Newsletters
Check out this post I wrote last year about Ohio-based startup pizzeria, Saint Francis Apizza, for another example of a restaurant whose owner leads with a Deming-like view:
