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Think of a place where military precision meets customer delight, via branded JIT assembly. The chefs of the world can – and perhaps ...
Think of a place where military precision meets customer delight, via branded JIT assembly. The chefs of the world can – and perhaps should – teach business leaders a thing or two. Think Chef Executive Officer, say Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove.
Anthony P Redendo’s name calls out for neon. It shouts restaurant. And for two years Redendo’s Pizzeria and Pasta has been serving the town of Fountain Hills, Arizona in the McDowell Mountains above Phoenix with Redendo as chef and co-owner. A typical evening sees 80 to 100 people pass through its doors.
There are more on Fridays as the Redendo’s team of up to five kitchen personnel conjure up everything from the “Memphis Belle” (barbeque sauced chicken pizza) to “Lights out in London”, their version of a broccoli alfredo.
Redendo’s is one of the hundreds of thousands of restaurants in the United States. It is not about to re-invent cuisine. Nor is Tony Redendo a celebrity chef with magazine profilers and TV producers forming a disorderly queue at his restaurant door. But Redendo’s and its owner are typical of an exceptional world with useful lessons for executives.
Need convincing? Spend an evening in the Redendo’s kitchen and you realise that tight deadlines, relentless pressure, ever more demanding customers and troubles with raw materials are not the monopoly of the management world. The kitchens of the world and their leaders offer abundant lessons for executives prepared to dip a finger into the sauce and take a taste.
“Great chefs are the football quarterbacks of the kitchen and try to lead their team to victory – a busy service time with no mistakes,” says Tony Redendo who also spends time as a culinary educator. Time management and organisation are keys to success and a chef will do whatever it takes to ensure a smooth operation. Hiring a great staff is important. Many chefs, Redondo explains, look for speedy, hyperactive people with great attention to detail going on to provide a pithy list of job requirements and career advice. “You can’t freak out under duress,” he says.
Executives are used to mental rather than physical stress (unless you count the odd business trip). A chef gets both types of stress at once – all the time and with little relief. A chef’s business environment usually doesn’t include a corner office with a leather couch and wet bar, for example. Forget the corporate health club or expense account. Chefs don’t have time or budgets for such luxuries. What they do have is incredible stamina and a genuine and tireless enthusiasm for the product. Not a bad start for a business leader.
If business lessons from the kitchen sounds far fetched, consider the willingness of executives to learn lessons from a veritable pot-pourri of sources. The military world is rigorously examined from every possible angle for wisdom or best practice with potential business crossover appeal. Ditto the world of sports. Indeed, executives are increasingly imaginative in sourcing their inspirations. Recent years have seen books extracting business lessons from sources as disparate as Jesus Christ, Winnie the Pooh, William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. Rubbermaid is even reported to send its executives to museums to help them come up with innovative ideas.
The trouble with most of these sources of inspiration is that they require an intellectual stretch. Most executives are not easily transmuted into Elizabeth I. It is difficult to transfer the leadership lessons of Moses to a Scottish factory floor. In addition, best practice from the military and sports worlds has been mined to death and is, as a result, unlikely to confer competitive advantage.
In contrast, seeking inspiration from the chefs of the world offers a potentially fresh source of business inspiration and one that is readily accessible and easily understood.
We asked Prue Leith, culinary guru and founder of Leith’s restaurant and school of food and wine in London (which she sold in 1995 and 1993 respectively) what managers can learn from the way chefs manage their kitchens? “Almost everything they need to know about business,” she replied. “Every day in a restaurant is like a football match, but the whole thing is choreographed like a ballet with everyone working together in perfect synchronisation. Great chefs are exceptional buyers and JIT merchants – they source the very best ingredients at the best prices; and everything has to end up on the plate at exactly the same time.”
An equally fulsome list of skills comes from Mike Day, CEO of the hospitality software company Indicater, and formerly hospitality director for the media mogul Robert Maxwell. “Chefs need to be able to deliver consistency of product at a predetermined price, normally fixed for a season, while coping with market price variances on a daily basis and high fluctuations in demand, subject to external influences like weather.”
Chefs are managers. They need to be able to manage and motivate their staff under enormous time pressure. They need to be skilled at selecting staff who can work to strict processes but at the same time not to stifle their individuality, upon which the future of the restaurant will depend. They need to be able to manage an often multi cultural team who have a high turnover and, as a result, require constant training.
For executives, the potential learning opportunities are obvious. The only problem is that kitchens are often very small, crowded places. They can be – perhaps need to be – dungeon-like, steamy, odour-filled. All are busy, very busy. Cramming a quizzical troupe of executives into a functioning kitchen is impractical. And so, on your behalf, we have undertaken a cook’s tour in search of the business lessons from the kitchen.