Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
“The more space we gave ourselves to dream, and the more trust we gave one another, the better we got”
3 Main Messages:
By listening intentionally and caring, you can give people exactly what they need
Owning your mistakes builds trust and confidence
Every little detail counts. How you do one thing is how you do everything
In December 2015 I was a harried Headteacher living in London. I had spent most of the previous year throwing myself into work and travelling to Newcastle, where my Dad was dying. As a result, my social life had diminished and my stress levels had increased. I missed my Dad, I missed my friends, and I felt swamped.
That Christmas, my husband gave me one of the greatest gifts on record: a guitar. Not just any guitar, but my Dad’s old guitar, cleaned up and restrung. He’d also arranged for a close friend of mine to travel across London once a fortnight to teach me some much needed skills, set me homework, and stay for dinner. The gift cost next to nothing but it was utterly priceless.
This is exactly what Will Guidara and his team tapped into when they ideated Unreasonable Hospitality and created the role of Dreamweaver in their world famous restaurant, Eleven Madison Park. They understood the art of listening and delivering what people really needed. This book tells the story of how they use that skill, combined with their hard-earned talents, and came to be named as the Best Restaurant in the World.
As Simon Sinek writes in the introduction, Unreasonable Hospitality is about “How to listen. How to be curious. It is a book about how to make people feel like they belong.” The lessons in these pages are inspirational and applicable in every industry: make sure the basics are brilliant and then pay attention and give your customers everything they want, with a cherry on top.
Guidara tells us the story of his journey as the son of a restaurateur, through training and various jobs, to his partnership with Daniel Humm earning three Michelin stars and four stars from the New York Times, as well as multiple other accolades. It’s a fantastic story with so many applicable lessons in it.
He gives credit to many others, not least his Dad, who is always there in the background, giving support and advice, as well as Danny Meyer, his mentor and employer. It was in Danny’s restaurant that Guidara learned the importance of language, of maintaining a consistent and steady leadership style, and of going one step further. “Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.” He admits that they did create a cult of sorts: one of creative consideration.
This is not a book about short cuts but about doing the work, learning your craft and being relentlessly ambitious in all you do. Guidara certainly worked his way up. As he says “How you do one thing is how you do everything.” His story reminded me of the legend told in Chop Wood, Carry Water as he advocates for learning slowly in order to develop strong foundations. “There’s no replacement for learning a system from the ground up”
He also credits books like The One Minute Manager which taught him the importance of giving feedback swiftly, generously and honestly as well as finding as many opportunities as possible to affirm and reward brilliance and hard work.
Yet it is the art that inspired me while reading this book. The art of service. The choreography and care. The music, lighting, place settings, coat check, secret signals, greetings, and all the thoughtful and systemised ways in which the customer is meticulously treated. They paid absolute attention to the smallest of details and then went one step further with outrageously thoughtful, personalised and priceless care.
While being thoroughly entertained by the stories here, I was struck by how replicable the ideas are. Ultimately, Guidara and his team created a culture of caring. They were passionate and ambitious in all that they did and they brought the whole team with them. They used a host of rules and recipes which can be reproduced, such as the 95/5 Rule and The One Inch Rule.
Rather than share those here, however, I urge you to read this book and then consider how your team and your clients can benefit from the lessons taught here. By being ambitious, by practicing constantly, by taking onboard feedback and learning from mistakes they managed to reach perfection.
If only I had applied the same approach to my guitar playing.
