CHAPTER 9

WORKING WITH PURPOSE, ON PURPOSE

I was reading an old review of Eleven Madison Park, written by Moira Hodgson for the New York Observer. The review, which had come out in April 2006-just a few months before I'd arrived at EMP, and a few months after Daniel had gotten there-was a good one. Hodgson had given the restaurant three and a half out of four stars, which might have been better than they deserved, given that they were still struggling to get food to the right tables.

'The place needed a bit of Miles Davis.'

I remember reading that out loud to Daniel in the windowless back office we shared. He screwed up his face and, in his heavy Swiss accent, asked me: 'What the hell does that mean?'

I had no idea, but I wanted to find out.

We needed the how.

But I wasn't reading that old review to find out what we could do better; I'd unearthed it because at the time we were looking for language to articulate our vision to the team. We were satisfied with our mission statement-to be the four-star restaurant for the next generation-but that was the what.

Don't Try to Be All Things to All People

Speaking of reviews and criticism-I read it. All of it. Every word (with the exception of most comment sections).

I'm always interested in what others, and not just the esteemed critic from The New York Times , think about what we're doing. If your business involves making people happy, then you can't be

good at it if you don't care what people think. The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won't be far behind.

Restaurants are creative pursuits. As with most creative endeavors, there's no clear right or wrong. The choices you make are always going to be subjective, a matter of opinion.

But I don't change something every time one or two people say they don't like something-maybe not even if a lot of them don't like it! If you try to be all things to all people, it's proof that you don't have a point of view-and if you want to make an impact, you need to have a point of view.

What criticism offers you, then, is an invitation to have your perspective challenged-or at least to grow by truly considering it. You might stick with a choice you've been criticized for or end up somewhere completely different. The endgame isn't the point as much as the process: you grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again.

Articulate Your Intentions

Unlike his fellow greats Dizzy Gillespie or Duke Ellington, who developed signature sounds and spent their careers refining them, Miles Davis reinvented himself-radically, drastically-with every consecutive album. Those reinventions often alienated fans and infuriated critics-and, equally often, went on to challenge and change modern music.

Davis's influences were incredibly eclectic and wide-ranging. He was in dialogue with rock, pop, flamenco, and classical music from the Western world, as well as with Indian and Arabic musical ideas -all while he was reinventing jazz, the quintessential American art form.

He could be difficult. He'd yell at reporters who asked stupid questions and was known for turning his back on audiences. (Side note: I did not look to Miles Davis when it came to inspiration for our hospitality.) And yet, Davis was also a fantastic collaborator. He went out of his way to make music with and to promote some of the most incredible musicians of the twentieth century-greats like John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wayne Shorter, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Wynton Kelly, and too many others to name. Not only did he partner freely and openly with those musicians on his work in the studio, he encouraged them to find their own voices, pursue their own projects, and thrive in their own careers.

I had learned from my dad the importance of intentionalityknowing what it is you're trying to do, and making sure everything you do is in service of that goal. From Danny, I'd learned the importance of articulating that intention to our team.

To this day, I can't say for sure what Moira Hodgson was trying to tell us. But the more we learned about Miles and the approach he took to his work, the more inspired we became about how we wanted to approach ours. That throwaway reference turned out to be the greatest gift anyone could have given us. We had been looking for a way to put our ambitions and values into language, to find words for what we wanted to be. Researching Miles gave us eleven of them.

But Daniel and I hadn't done that yet at EMP. The two of us had spent hours together, talking and planning and dreaming; we were fundamentally aligned in an intuitive way. Still, a hundred and fifty people worked for us at EMP, and every one of them had to be aligned with the mission. We needed language. Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.

Over the next month or two, I worked with the team to create a list of the words that came up over and over again when critics and other musicians talked about Miles:

It was lucky the Hodgson review referenced a musician, because I love music and have played it my whole life. After the review, I started listening to more Miles Davis, both inside the restaurant and out. Once I was more familiar with his music, I read everything I could find about Miles and about his creative process-specifically what other musicians said about the approach he took to making music and how that process resulted in the enormous impact he had on the form.

These resonated with us and became a road map of sorts. (The list was long, but we wanted eleven.) The review had been right: if our restaurant was going to evolve, it did need more Miles Davis.

'Cool' was the first word on the list. That seemed right, as we'd already articulated the importance of that concept for ourselves: if we were going to create a four-star restaurant for the next generation, it was going to have to be cool.

We printed a large sign with those words underneath our logo and hung it in our kitchen. That sign became a touchstone, a guiding light, a way to hold ourselves accountable. Whenever we were brainstorming or facing a difficult decision, we looked at the list. The restaurant would change radically over the years that followed, but we felt confident that what we were doing would make sense, as long as we stayed true to the words on that list.

In the years to come, many would say 'endless reinvention' was the defining characteristic of our restaurant, which did change, over and over again-not ever for the sake of change itself but because in order to be the best in the world, we had to be authentic. For us, that meant serving to others what we wished to receive, and as we grew and matured and evolved, what we wanted to receive changed, and so did what we served to others.

But of all the words on that list, 'collaborative' was the one we seized on as the first one to pursue. It stood out to us, almost as if it had been highlighted: the one word that would provide us with the key to all the others on the list.

Strategy Is for Everyone

The fact we'd found fundamental inspiration from a restaurant critic pointing to a jazz trumpeter gave us the idea there might be merit in looking for guidance in other, unexpected places-especially those outside the metaphorical walls of the restaurant world.

We looked at organizations known for extraordinary company cultures-huge companies, like Nordstrom and Apple and JetBlue. They all held strategic planning sessions, or long-form meetings where groups from across the organization got together to brainstorm ways for the company to grow. (Very corporate-smart.)

When companies expand, they often say, 'The bigger we get, the smaller we have to act.' (This was a mantra at Shake Shack.) At EMP in the early days, we went the other way. We were a single restaurant-part of a bigger company, but operated as if we weren't, with a huge amount of autonomy. We were little, but we wanted to act big.

This was a revelation to us; the practice is still virtually unheard of in the restaurant world. It was also a relief. Up until then, Daniel and I had been doing all the decision-making and goal-setting by ourselves. Why, when we'd assembled a crew of vibrant, bright young people who loved restaurants and food and hospitality? No matter how ambitious or innovative we were, we could never hope to match the combined brainpower of our entire staff.

Over time, our strategic planning meetings became brainstorming sessions, where we'd decide as a collective what we wanted to do in the year to come. But that first year, we posed only one question: What do we want to embody?

Immediately we could see how inviting our team to take part in identifying and naming the goals of the company would increase the likelihood we'd all meet those goals together. Of course we'd be able to come up with more (and better!) ideas if they were involved -not to mention the sense of ownership they'd get from making those contributions.

We wanted to be one of the best restaurants in New York. We wanted to make our restaurant excellent without sacrificing warmth, contemporary without compromising standards. But before we set out on that journey, we needed to know how we characterized ourselves, both as individuals and as a team.

This inclusivity was important. At many of the companies we'd studied, strategic planning was reserved for upper management, but we included everybody on the team, from the assistant general manager and the chef de cuisine all the way to the dishwashers, prep cooks, and assistant servers, which is what we called our bussers.

Our first-ever strategic planning meeting took place in 2007. We closed the restaurant for the day-admittedly unreasonable-and invited everyone who worked at EMP to come together and strategize as a team about our future.

We were lucky we were small enough for that to be possible, because a busser sees all kinds of things a general manager never can. If we were serious about every detail, then everyone's perspective and vantage point would be valuable.

They broke into ten groups, scattered across the restaurant, each gathered around a notebook. I spent the day walking from group to group, noting as people got excited, argued, and laughed with one another. I dropped in but was careful not to contribute. This was their time.

On the day itself, I introduced the concept of the meeting, explained what we hoped to get out of it-and got out of the team's way.

Because I didn't want anyone to feel that they couldn't speak freely, we'd had the dining room and kitchen managers do their strategic planning the day before. On the day of the team meeting, managers had a different role: the sous-chefs came out into the dining room and took custom sandwich orders from the staff, while the dining room managers staffed the kitchen, putting the orders together. (Give people a safe space to mess with their bosses, and some of them are going to go for it-I remember one request for a turkey sandwich featuring one slice of untoasted wheat, one slice of toasted rye, and three dots of mayo.) These two groups switching roles left everyone with a new appreciation for the difficulties their counterparts faced every night.

In the afternoon, the ten groups stood up to present what they'd come up with, and we saw how aligned we were. Ultimately, four words took center stage. None of them were particularly groundbreaking on their own, but we determined they could be-if we could embody all of them simultaneously.

Education Passion Excellence Hospitality

Education was a no-brainer. We had always known that we wanted to build a culture based on teaching and learning, and to hire those who were curious about what they didn't know and generous with what they did. Similarly, we wanted people who were passionate about the mission, as fired up as we were about what we were trying to accomplish.

But it was the two remaining words on the list-and the inherent conflict between them-that would inform everything we did going forward.

Choose Conflicting Goals

Hospitality and excellence. Those two concepts? They're not friends.

And it's pretty easy to scare your staff so they almost never, ever make a technical misstep in the dining room. But, all ethical objections aside, if they're living in constant fear of being caught in a mistake, you're not going to get their most realized, relaxed selves interacting with your guests.

It's easy to have a sweet culture of hospitality if you're not going to be maniacal about precision and detail. Who cares if the waitress at the diner forgot to bring your Coke? What's a little sloppiness between friends?

In fact, I could hear the tension between these two concepts when I was walking around that first strategic planning meeting. Some people were arguing passionately about the importance of

welcome and warmth and connection, while others were convinced nothing should take precedence over an impeccably trained staff and spit-polishing every formal aspect of the restaurant to a perfect shine.

Southwest Airlines, for instance, set out to be both the lowestcost airline in America and number one in both customer and employee satisfaction. Those goals would seem to be in opposition, and perhaps they are. But much of the time, they've succeeded at all three. Certainly, the efforts they've made toward those contradictory goals have done wonders for their bottom line: for the last half century, Southwest has been the most profitable airline in the country.

Putting both hospitality and excellence on our list was a way of recognizing that success was going to come from approaching the problem of hospitality vs. excellence in the most difficult way possible: in order to succeed, we needed to be good at both. This wasn't an either/or-it was an and. Later, I would learn that the management guru Roger Martin calls this 'integrative thinking.' In When More Is Not Better , he argues that leaders should actually go out of their way to choose conflicting goals.

As Martin says, multiple conflicting goals force you to innovate. We'd seen it ourselves. When I'd arrived at EMP, one faction had been sacrificing hospitality in the name of precision and excellence, while the other had been delivering warmer service with less finesse. Those who survived and thrived with us had been able to see the merit in the other group's priorities.

By putting both words on our list, we were acknowledging that we would need to recognize the inherent friction between hospitality and excellence. We would need to explore that contradiction and embrace it-integrating two opposing ideas and embodying both simultaneously.

Know Why Your Work Is Important

When I was coming up in hospitality, it was pretty common for parents to lament their children's decision to pursue a career in restaurants. They wanted their kids to be doctors, or lawyers, or bankers; they didn't want them to serve other people-and especially not as a career.

I wrapped up that first strategic planning meeting by telling the team, 'The moment you start to pursue service through the lens of hospitality, you understand there's nobility in it. We may not be saving people's lives, but we do have the ability to make their lives better by creating a magical world they can escape to-and I see that not as an opportunity, but as a responsibility, and a reason for pride.'

I had a different point of view. I wanted our team members to understand that hospitality elevates service not only for the person receiving it, but for the person delivering it. Serving other human beings can feel demeaning, unless you first stop and acknowledge the importance of the work and the impact you can have on others when you're doing it.

I took a call recently from a Cornell hotel-school grad looking for career advice. The first thing he said was, 'I'm trying to figure out whether or not I want to stay in this horrible industry.' It was a short call; I told him pretty quickly it sounded like he shouldn't.

I've made it my mission to help the people who work for me see what's important about what they do. Even at MoMA, we didn't see our guests as a bunch of customers looking for lunch; we saw them as museumgoers-people on an adventure, realizing their dream of being inspired at one of the greatest modern art museums on earth. That simple shift had an automatic and profound impact on how our team acted, and on the hospitality our guests received.

No matter what you do, it's hard to excel if you don't love it. I've had bad days and weeks like everyone else, but I've always been able to say, 'I can't imagine doing anything else,' because I've always been able to tap into what's important about my job. I genuinely believe that in restaurants we can give people a break from reality even just for a short time-and, as cheesy as it sounds, that we can make the world a better place. Because when you're really, really nice to people, they'll be really nice to others, who will in turn pay it forward. That energizes me, even when I'm depleted.

I speak to people across industries and in different fields. When I encounter someone who thinks their work doesn't matter, it's usually because they haven't dug deep enough to recognize the importance of the role they play. When I spoke at a real estate conference, it was easy for me to tell when someone was operating with passion and purpose. Many told me they sold houses; the great ones understood they were selling homes.

Without exception, no matter what you do, you can make a difference in someone's life. You must be able to name for yourself why your work matters. And if you're a leader, you need to encourage everyone on your team to do the same.

This applies to every industry I can think of. You can be in the financial services business, or in the business of providing people with a plan so they can provide a future for their families. You can be in the insurance business, or in the business of offering people the comfort of knowing they and their loved ones are covered, safe and secure, no matter what happens. It's the difference between coming to work to do a job and coming to work to be a part of something bigger than yourself.