Danny Meyer on what hospitality teaches us about culture

Danny Meyer is one of the most respected restaurateurs in the world. Beyond the success of the likes of Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern and Shake Shack he’s also become famous for writing a book, Setting the Table, that has become an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of readers. The book is used as training manual beyond the hospitality trade by businesses who want to be famous for providing strong customer service.

Danny talks about service being a monologue, whereas hospitality is a dialogue. In his new book, What Could Possibly Go Right?, he updates his story. His first book documented many slips on the way to running a series of beloved restaurants; he was proud that he’d never closed an eaterie. The new book catalogues closures, missteps, Covid and an even an intervention by his leadership team when the culture of the business was on the wrong tracks.

Danny tells Bruce that restaurants are the perfect space to watch culture on fast forward, and how anyone can learn lessons from his businesses as they strive to be the most beloved venues in New York.

It was an honour to speak to him about such a wonderful new book.

Timestamps

00:00 – Danny Meyer on founding Union Square Cafe and Shake Shack
01:30 – Why hospitality became the central question
02:29 – What Zagat revealed about food, service, and feeling
03:29 – Why service is not the same as hospitality
04:19 – The five stakeholders in enlightened hospitality
06:45 – Why writing works like a chef developing a dish
10:28 – Can hospitality work outside restaurants?
11:18 – Why hospitality is a team sport
16:09 – What high HQ looks like in practice
18:37 – Celebrating behaviours instead of just results
21:10 – Why culture needed a shared definition
23:05 – Why values alone were not enough
24:03 – Outbehaving the competition
25:29 – “Centre the salt shaker” as a cultural shorthand
25:58 – The culture formula: wanted behaviours minus tolerated unwanted behaviours
28:58 – Identity, perception, and how people see themselves
31:55 – What leaders miss when they stay behind the office door
33:29 – Four employees confront Danny about culture drifting
35:21 – How it feels when others build on your ideas

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce
Danny, thank you so much for joining me. I always traditionally start with the same question, which is asking you to introduce who you are and what you do.

Danny Meyer
Well, my name is Danny Meyer and I am a longtime restaurateur. I founded Union Square Cafe in nineteen eighty five when I was twenty seven, so you can do the maths on that. And since then there’s been many, many full service restaurants all in New York City and Shake Shack, which I’m happy to say is even in the UK.

Bruce (00:31)
Now you’ve become famous not only for feeding that many happy people in New York and through Shake Shack, but through the first book that you wrote and the first book, Setting the Table, has become, for anyone like myself or anyone who listens to this, anyone who’s obsessive about human nature and human culture, it’s become this Bible, for want of a better word. And so…

Bruce (00:56)
when I saw that you had this new book, What Could Possibly Go Right coming out, it was the thrill of seeing your favourite show being recommissioned for a new episode. I just wanted to sort of really go into the themes of culture today. And firstly, I just wanted to ask, why do you think you are so interested in culture? You describe yourself as a people pleaser, but what is it that makes you so interested in the themes of human interaction like that?

Danny Meyer (01:25)
I think some of it has to do with having grown up in the Midwest part of the United States, in St. Louis, Missouri. And as I look back, all the the people who I grew up with and the the restaurants that I went to were they were just they I felt like they were on your side. the food wasn’t nearly as good back home as as it would be when I moved to New York. But then when I moved to New York and the food was really good, this was in the nineteen eighties.

Danny Meyer (01:53)
The places didn’t seem to be very nice to you. And and I just asked myself, whoever wrote the rule that the food would taste worse if you went to a place where people were on your side. And I just started tugging at at this meaning of hospitality. And it finally dawned on me, back in the back in the old days, meaning pre-internet, we had something called the Zagat Survey. It was a paper and pencil.

Danny Meyer (02:22)
Opportunity for New Yorkers to weigh in on what they thought of all the meals they had had that previous year. And you could rate a restaurant based on its food decor and service. And you could also say which were your five favourite restaurants that you had been to. So what I started noticing year after year was that as my one and only restaurant for the first 10 years of my career was Union Square Cafe. That was before Gramercy Tavern. But Union Square Cafe kept

Danny Meyer (02:50)
Marching up the list of New York’s favourite restaurants. And yet, even the year that it first hit number three as the third favourite restaurant in New York, the food was a twelve was the twelfth best, and the service was the tenth best, and the decor was sixty-fifth best. And I said, We must be doing something that Zagat’s not asking about. And the same thing happened year after year. And I finally it hit me like a right a light lightning bolt, and I said.

Danny Meyer (03:21)
Service is very different than hospitality. And we must be, we must be at the top of hospitality, which is the way you make people feel, whereas service was the way you technically delivered the product. So that’s what I started thinking about deeply. I started thinking about the word hospitality, what it meant, what it didn’t mean. And I started preaching that to my team. And then when we opened Gramercy Tavern,

Danny Meyer (03:48)
I’ll just fast forward a few years. Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern would vie for number one and two with each other as New York’s favourite one and two restaurants. And then 11 Madison Park after several years. My next restaurant was in the top five. We had three of the top five favourites. We never had three of the top five food scores. They were good, but

Danny Meyer (04:10)
I started really getting the religion that hospitality, the way you made people feel, the sense that you were on someone else’s side was the key. And then finally, it it also hit me that that we all have the same five stakeholders in life. We all any if you’re in business, you’ve got people who work there and you’ve got customers and you’ve got a community in which you do business, you’ve got suppliers, and you’ve got investors.

Danny Meyer (04:38)
That I would actually unleash the hospitality in that order for our stakeholders to create a virtuous cycle, believing that the the better our staff members felt when they came to work, the greater were the odds that our guests were going to feel remarkably good. And the better our guests felt, the more revenue we’d have, and therefore we could do more things for our community. And the more our community embraced us, we’d have even more revenue.

Danny Meyer (05:07)
And we could get better suppliers, not not just people who had the best product, but who would deliver most quickly and give us the best prices. And then that would leave more for our investors if we were half good at running the business. And it turned out that really happy investors were the best way to have happy employees because that’s when people get raises and promotions when you’re making money. So this was the virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality. And when I wrote setting the table.

Danny Meyer (05:37)
It forced me to make intentional things that had always been intuitive to me. I didn’t write it because I knew it. I write it to learn it. And then once I learned it, I was able to teach it. And that’s why it’s taken about 20 years to write what could possibly go right. Because I’ve spent the last 20 years working on everything I learned from setting the table.

Bruce (06:02)
I really, I’m really fascinated. I’ll skip ahead to a question that was going to ask later then, because I love the idea that writing is this meditative process, which actually helps us organise our thoughts. And so what you’re saying effectively there is that even though you’ve got these 20 years of learning since setting the table, actually it’s the moment now, probably took a couple of years or whatever to write this book, it’s the moment of setting it down into paper, it’s helping you define it and crystallise it. So has there been anything about that process then?

Bruce (06:31)
that has helped you refine your take.

Danny Meyer (06:34)
A thousand percent. A thousand percent. I think it’s it’s I’m not the kind of writer that has a million ideas and says what I’ve really got to do is share these ideas with the world. I think of myself more like a chef. So the first thing a chef does is they you know, they look at what’s in the larder or the at the green market and they come up with an idea and they they

Danny Meyer (07:01)
Put it together and they cook it. And it’s either good or it’s not good. They they work on it, they try to make it better. Then they try to teach it to their own cooks. And once their cooks can do it really, really well, then they start to serve it to their guests in the restaurant. And if their guests really, really like it a lot, there may come some point where the chef says, You know what? I now have this many recipes.

Danny Meyer (07:27)
I think I’m gonna write a book, a cookbook, number one, so that the next cooks can cook this stuff, you know, really faithfully. But then furthermore, why not share it with other people at the same time? But the process didn’t start by for me. So for me, it’s I have a bunch of business theories and business ideas. I didn’t wake up one morning thinking these things consciously or intentionally. They were all intuitive.

Danny Meyer (07:57)
But after after working on them year after year after year and then teaching them to our team and seeing that they worked, this is after setting the table. We’ve been using setting the table as our you you call it a Bible, I c I call it our playbook. we’ve been using it as our playbook now for probably the last twenty years or so.

Bruce (08:16)
I was interested it took you four years to do that. And was it only because you saw other people doing that that

Danny Meyer (08:21)
Yes.

Bruce (08:22)
gave you the confidence to do it yourself?

Danny Meyer (08:25)
Yes, you know, there’s there’s a little bit of I I think I’m a reasonably humble person. You can take that, you can take any gift you may have too far. And my humility got in the way and I just said to myself, Don’t make your own team read this book. You wrote it. It’s it’s like I don’t want to be the kind of person that spends twenty minutes making you see all my my baby pictures or or the you know, pictures of my family.

Danny Meyer (08:55)
I just kind of felt like I wrote the book. I wrote it for me because I wanted to get this stuff out of my heart and out of my head and on paper. And and yes, it took me four years to make it required reading and training for our team. And what did that, kind of frustratingly, wherever I would go, literally as far as South Africa or all over this country, I would have people in restaurants, not only restaurants,

Danny Meyer (09:20)
Hardware stores, beauty salons, say, you know, we use your book as a as a way to understand hospitality. And I said to myself, this is our bloody playbook. Why are we why are we not that it would be as if it would again, it would be as if I had written a cookbook or my chef had written a cookbook, and I would go to other restaurants and they were cooking our dishes better than we did. And that was very, very frustrating.

Danny Meyer (09:48)
So that’s when we got really, really you know, dogged about we created book clubs within our our company and really brought it to life. And I said, if if these are our recipes, we better be cooking them better than everybody else.

Bruce (10:05)
really interested. There’s quite often when we get obsessed with culture, one of the areas that we often immediately see culture is in sports teams and what people will push back and say, well, look, you can’t necessarily use the metaphor of sport because it’s so imprecise. But everything you say about hospitality, I’m immediately struck. Firstly, the thing that you’ve mentioned there, that the idea that there’s a through line between dealing with our employees well,

Bruce (10:31)
and our customers being happy is a really interesting thing. the only thing I was worried about is people might say, well, hospitality is different. Now, in the same way sport maybe is different, is hospitality different or is it actually a perfect metaphor for keeping customers happy and anything that applies in a restaurant would apply in any business? What’s your take on that?

Danny Meyer (10:53)
Well, first of all, let me answer you the question you first pose, which is, is sports an apt metaphor? And I think it absolutely is an apt metaphor. I believe that hospitality is a team sport, just like any sports team. Now you may say a a singles match in tennis is not a team sport, but even that singles player has a has a team up in the crowd that’s you know part of the training and part of the coaching, etc. Anyway.

Danny Meyer (11:21)
When I think about a great sports team, let me I know this may not land incredibly well with your audience, but if I’m watching a a baseball game or what we call football or basketball game, I can tell almost everything I need to tell based on I’ll I’ll take baseball for a moment, looking at the dugout where all the players are waiting between innings when their team is at bat.

Danny Meyer (11:49)
Now baseball has more statistics than almost any sport there is. All the statistics in baseball are connected to what happens on the playing field, right? Fielding percentage, batting percentage with runners on base, batting percentage when you’re batting from the left side, the right side, on and on and on.

Danny Meyer (12:10)
Half the game is spent on the bench. And there are no statistics for what happens on the bench. And I think this is the case with any sport, right? As long as the team is in or out, there’s there’s and what’s happening while the teams are on the bench is culture. What’s happening when teams are on the bench is how they care for each other when the chips are up and when the chips are down. What’s happening on the bench is

Danny Meyer (12:37)
How they’re motivating each other to bring out the best in each other. In any great team, it’s not just about individual performance, it’s about who are you for your team? And that’s the exact same thing in a restaurant, it’s the exact same thing in a technology lab, it’s the same thing in a hospital. We’re all paid to do the thing we do, but we are really paid for who we are while we’re doing it. And that is what

Danny Meyer (13:06)
is really the root of the culture that that you end up having in whatever organization you are.

Bruce (13:12)
So I the first question really that would go into the mechanics of that culture is the onboarding, it’s the hiring, it’s the selection. Now I know in your first book you mentioned that initially when you’ve been setting up in New York, you didn’t want to hire New Yorkers because you had this idea in your head and you know, we sort of have these evolving thoughts. I wonder, you quite often talk about whether people have got a hospitality quotient or whether they are optimistic, positive, curious people.

Bruce (13:40)
To what extent is that indelible in your mind? Or is it about how someone presents to you? There might be a different person in the years time. To what extent, I’d love to get inside this hiring process as the first stage of culture and how you think about it and how you’d advise someone to present or what they could change if they could change it.

Danny Meyer (13:59)
Yeah, well one of my one of my favourite chapters in my new book, What Could Possibly Go Right, is a chapter called Think Like a Winemaker. And I made a a metaphor that wasn’t a sports team, but it was really thinking about how a w we a w any winemaker wants to make a great wine year after year after year, just like any business person wants to field a winning team year after year, or sports team wants to field a winning team. And

Danny Meyer (14:28)
It dawned on me that that where it all starts for a winemaker is the quality of the soil. Right? They can get the best grapes in the world, but the best grapes are never going to taste any better than the health of the soil in which they’re growing. In fact, they’re going to take their their flavor from that soil. Well, the soil is the culture, and and the grapes are the people we hire. We’ve got to hire the right people.

Danny Meyer (14:55)
For our culture. But first and foremost, we’ve got to keep our culture healthy and make it very, very clear to everybody who we bring in, you are the right person for this culture, if this culture is the right culture for who you are as well. And so we’re very resolute that yes, we want to hire people who have what we call a high HQ, a high hospitality quotient. And those are people who

Danny Meyer (15:22)
are happier themselves when they are making other people feel better. It is just an emotional wiring. And you’re right. I believe that that is pretty much indelibly printed. Your HQ, just like your IQ. I I don’t know how I got my IQ. I I promise you mine is lower than yours. But what an IQ does is it it’s a predictor of one’s ability to learn things. I I could read the whole dictionary tonight and my IQ won’t change.

Danny Meyer (15:51)
It it just won’t. It’s not about how much I know. It’s about my my proclivity to being able to learn. An HQ is a predictor of the degree to which it’s going to make you happier when you make someone else feel better. So we identified six emotional skills that are always present in someone who’s got a high HQ. And our first job is to make the soil really healthy, make it very, very clear how we do business.

Danny Meyer (16:20)
what our culture stands for, then go bring in the right grapes that will thrive there. There’s a reason that Cabernet Sauvignon does not grow well in the UK. There’s a reason that we can’t make apple cider the way you do. There’s a reason we can’t make butter the way you do. And it all starts with the soil. It it totally does. So we try to figure out what’s the right grape for our soil. That’s our people.

Danny Meyer (16:48)
And then to answer your question, I believe there are some people who have an off-the-charts high IQ in the world. And there are some people who on the other end of the spectrum really they just don’t know how to learn at all. I bl I also believe that the vast majority of us live somewhere in the middle. And and that’s great, that’s fine. I don’t want to live a life with you know nothing but

Danny Meyer (17:14)
geniuses all over the place. and I also think it would be strange if every human being had an eye popping hospitality quotient. In other words, they were I don’t know, they were kinder and more optimistic and more curious and had a better work ethic and they were more empathetic and more self-aware and had more s integrity than anyone else on earth. That would be a little weird. So what can we do?

Danny Meyer (17:41)
Well, what we can do is to do the best job we can to h to identify and hire as many people with a v high HQ, not the highest, but high, and then what we can do is celebrate the behaviours that we want to see here. And by celebrating them, whereas most companies are only celebrating things they can measure, like, you know, profit and earnings and you know

Danny Meyer (18:09)
lower food costs in our business, et cetera. We want to celebrate the behaviours, not just the outputs. And by celebrating the behaviours, you actually you’re not necessarily going to raise someone’s HQ, but you’re going to you’re going to bring out the best in that person where where they say to themselves, My actual native gifts are valued here. And I’m going to unleash more of them for the benefit of this team. And by so doing

Danny Meyer (18:39)
We have been able not only to strengthen our culture and the employee experience, and then that, of course, is directly linked, as you just said, to our guest experience, to our customer experience. And it really becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that self-sustains itself because people with a high HQ want to work with other people with a high HQ, making other people feel better. And when you do, in fact, make other people feel better, starting with

Danny Meyer (19:08)
people on your own team, it becomes a better place to work. And it’s just when you get that that thing spinning, it’s a really, really powerful and wonderful thing.

Bruce (19:18)
The wonderful thing about this book is that if you taught us in the first book by really sort of revealing the inner turmoil that goes on behind every experience, in this book, you confess to dozens of mistakes. You know, you don’t spare your own ego in terms of saying things that you’ve done wrong, things that have gone wrong and gifting us the opportunity to learn from them. And one of the things actually as a result, and maybe this is one of the things you benefit from the process of writing down.

Bruce (19:47)
You give us this formula for culture, which is actually immensely instructive. I always use a definition of culture, which is culture is the behavior in organizations, whether rewarded, encouraged or tolerated. But I think actually you enhance upon that. I wonder if you could give us your formula that you came to for culture and just explain how you came to it really.

Danny Meyer (20:12)
Well, I it what first dawned on me, Bruce, is that you we all use the word culture all the time, and yet if you lined up any, you know, twenty people in a room and asked them, please write down two sentences to describe what you mean by culture, I promise you you would have 20 different answers. And that doesn’t make anyone bad, it just it’s a good thing to acknowledge because

Danny Meyer (20:38)
If I’m going to use the word culture and if I’m going to say we want to actually advance our culture, then my team better have a common understanding of what I mean when I use the word culture. And so I’ve been in the same way that I think writing setting the table forced me to tease out what I meant when I kept talking about hospitality. I think what could possibly go right really helped me to tease out what I really meant when I used the word culture.

Danny Meyer (21:08)
Because what I found was that hospitality was something we we did, but culture was the the operating system that allowed it to happen. And so what I started off with a very rudimentary definition from one of my board members who said, it’s simple. Culture is how we do things around here. And at that point,

Danny Meyer (21:35)
I had a bunch of coffee mugs made for everybody in our company that said HWDB, how we do business. and that’s good. It it got to a certain point how we do things around here, but I really wasn’t being completely clear how we do business around here. And then I came up with another stupid mug and it had all of our family values on it. Look how many there are here. Do you expect anyone in the world to be able to memorize?

Danny Meyer (22:01)
All the you know, intuitive, engaged. No. So then I took it a step further and I narrowed those, you know, I think there were like 60 different family values that we crowdsourced from our team, narrowed that down to four, which were excellence, hospitality, entrepreneurial spirit, and integrity. And that was kind of working, but then it really wasn’t working. And the reason it wasn’t working so well was that.

Danny Meyer (22:28)
Number one, we’re not a family, we’re a business. And and it turned out that every now and then you have to fire somebody in a business and you don’t fire family members and the team would go into, you know, weeks of grieving after one of their own got fired. The other thing that was a problem with it’s really hard to hold someone accountable for a value. And so then my next, you know, and this was all while I was writing what could possibly go right. So I’m learning as I’m writing this thing.

Danny Meyer (22:57)
we met a a a friend who came to speak to our team and he said, guys, you know, I’m I love going to your restaurants and they’re really, really good, but I’m gonna tell you something right now. As you know, it’s a competitive landscape out there, and the best restaurants are not gonna be the ones that outcook the rest of the restaurants out there or outperform them in any way. It’s gonna be the ones that outbehave them.

Danny Meyer (23:25)
And I kind of scratched my head and I go, like, what do you what do you mean by that? And he said, you need to be very clear with your team what behaviours you expect from them. And then you need to hold your team accountable for really putting those behaviours into play. And furthermore, you need to make those behaviours. He said, your values are they’re irrefutable. Who wouldn’t want to be more excellent or more hospitable or have more entrepreneurial spirit or have more integrity?

Danny Meyer (23:55)
That’s great, but those could be anybody’s. And he said, you need to f instead of values and instead of family values, you need to have expected behaviours for your business. And you need to make those behaviours connect to stories that are part of your company’s heritage, part of your culture’s heritage, so that they feel uniquely yours. And that’s what we did. And a hundred percent of the expected behaviours we have.

Danny Meyer (24:22)
all came from setting the table. for example, one of the expected behaviours is center the salt shaker. That’s all we have to say to somebody in our company. That relates to a story that’s in setting the table. It’s our story. and it’s it’s a very, very wonderful shorthand way for us to say, do it the right way, do it with excellence. and an un with an unwavering commitment to quality. That’s all we have to say.

Bruce (24:48)
So give us the formula. So give us your formula for culture. Yeah

Danny Meyer (24:49)
That’s the salt shaker style. So what this

Danny Meyer (24:52)
leads to is my formula, very simple, which is our culture will ultimately be all of the wanted behaviours that we celebrate minus all the unwanted behaviours that we tolerate. It’s that simple and it’s that hard. Celebrate the stuff you want, be very clear about what that stuff is, and then don’t tolerate any of the stuff you don’t want.

Danny Meyer (25:17)
And as you said, in in what could possibly go right, I am making it very clear all the mistakes. Well, actually, I’ve only scratched the surface on the mistakes because there’s been a whole lot more, but it’s really a catalog of what I’ve learned by trying to put hospitality in practice and seeing how well it worked. But what setting the table didn’t give me was a roadmap for now what do you do now that you got bigger? If you really want to.

Danny Meyer (25:45)
Keep advancing your culture as you grow your business.

Bruce (25:49)
I suspect though for leaders, they can see something of the shaker method in that formula. Because if the formula is, you know, the behaviours you encourage and the behaviours you tolerate, well, that sort of constant gentle pressure, which is the method of the salt shaker, moving the salt shaker to the middle of the table, reminding people that’s our standard. Well, that constant gentle pressure…

Bruce (26:16)
presumably is one way you deal with those behaviours you don’t like. It’s sort of pushing constantly, making sure that people know that this is a standard that we measure up to. Do you see them as a piece with each other?

Danny Meyer (26:26)
That’s true.

Danny Meyer (26:28)
Absolutely. However, sometimes there are performers who no matter how much pressure, no matter how constant, and whether gentle or not, isn’t changing their behaviours. And we had to come to grips with that. That there are for any task out there, the team that that is responsible for doing that task either can do it or cannot do it.

Danny Meyer (26:53)
And they either will do it or they won’t do it. And so that construct helped me to see where sometimes constant gentle pressure doesn’t work. I I could go up to a boulder with my finger and constantly and gently pressure it and it ain’t moving. Cause cause it won’t. Right. And so sometimes that’s how an employee is, and so I had to take that constant gentle pressure works 90% of the time.

Danny Meyer (27:21)
And it’s a great way ninety percent of the time to take somebody who either needs to learn how to do something better or who needs to have a little bit of an attitude adjustment. That can often work, but sometimes it doesn’t. And so I had to learn a whole new new way of dealing with that.

Bruce (27:39)
Yeah, and I guess, and you cover things that sort of have escalated beyond that and sometimes getting people to have a conversation with the person they’ve wronged is not the right resolution. I know we haven’t got immense amount of time left. I just wanted to come to a theme of identity really. The way we perceive ourselves in the world and the story we tell about ourselves actually comes up as a theme across both of your books indirectly. Specifically, these one place, the modern in,

Bruce (28:04)
think it’s in the previous book, might be where the bar and the restaurant were sort of looking at each other and one side looked down on the other and the other side looked down on each other. But actually in this book as well, you’ve got people who perceive themselves as part of a restaurant, but not part of the group. And I’m really interested this idea that how we see ourselves in the world and the story we tell ourselves about in the world plays a really big part in how we show up.

Bruce (28:32)
Obviously, because you’ve got these famous restaurant brands, they might have looked down initially on Shake Shack. And so I’m just interested in whether you think about ideas of identity or whether you’ve learned anything about that, how people perceive themselves.

Danny Meyer (28:47)
you know, that’s a very, very good and deep question you’re asking me. I think that one of the things I learned by virtue of writing in both cases is that I see myself as as someone who grew up as the middle child of three in a state called Missouri, which is right in the middle of the United States, and I see myself as someone who’s constantly trying to bring people together.

Danny Meyer (29:16)
And someone who found that that good food and drink is a good way to do that. and and now when you talk about conflicts within restaurants, et cetera, or within any business, I feel like I’m constantly trying to bring people together. I don’t want one team to look down on the other. I that’s why I created this this idea, maybe it’s too idealistic, called sibling revelry, which is trying to take the age-old

Danny Meyer (29:43)
human dynamic of sibling rivalry and saying, okay, we’re competing. Cain and Abel are never going to stop competing with each other. But could you compete in a way that actually lifts each other up? And what can we actually learn from one another if we’re on the same team? And I think I learned that skill as a middle child. and I, you know, I bring it, I bring it to work every day. And yet I’m in conflict with myself because as I said earlier,

Danny Meyer (30:11)
We’re not a family, we’re a business. And sometimes you’ve got to be, you know, very straightforward and clear cut that sorry guys, this is a business and this is how we do things around here.

Bruce (30:22)
When it comes to culture, I’m really struck by a moment you talk about, which is when some senior employees staged close to an intervention on you, they came and said, we don’t think the organisation as it is today is the way that you conceived of it. And one of the things that came as a result of that, whether it was directly or not, was your head of culture left the business. And I just wonder if there’s anything that you think about, about the hierarchy

Bruce (30:49)
that exists inside an organization and how leaders can stay true to what employees are feeling on the shop floor.

Danny Meyer (30:57)
Well, employees like like children are sometimes a lot smarter than we are. and when there’s a problem in the organization, they generally know it before I do. they are talking about it amongst themselves. And I think you know, one of one of the great jobs of any leader, there’s the there is this old kind of leadership technique that I’ve comp

Danny Meyer (31:21)
Completely refute, which is called the leader says, We have an open door policy. You should just come in. And that is the most passive aggressive thing a leader can say. What a leader should do is walk outside her own door and sense what the Vox Populi is actually feeling and saying and doing, and go bring it into your office at that point. And the story that you’re

Danny Meyer (31:48)
reminding me of, which is in the new book, What Could Possibly Go Right. I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that effectively. And four courageous employees set up an appointment with me and they came into my office. the good news is they felt safe enough to do that. So obviously I wasn’t the kind of boss that was making them fear that there would be retribution in a sense. But it still took a takes a lot of courage to go to your your ultimate boss.

Danny Meyer (32:16)
Not one of them reported to me directly. So they were skipping a couple layers and they came to me and they made it very clear in a very organized way that it didn’t feel like our culture and that something had gone astray. And and a lot of it had to do with the fact that the senior leaders in our company were singing out of key with one another. And when that happens, you know, when when

Danny Meyer (32:43)
People are singing out of key, the people reporting to them don’t know which song they should be singing, and they go to the one that feels the most comfortable, and then you end up having a very, very muddy culture.

Bruce (32:57)
The final thing I’ll ask you is how you feel about people who’ve taken inspiration from you and being mentored from you. And probably the obvious example is your former employee, Will Gwydara, who sort of took the idea of hospitality and then developed his own success with, I think, Unreasonable Hospitality is the way he frames it. I just wonder how it feels to you to…

Bruce (33:21)
have some of the things that you’ve been most famous for be an inspiration or maybe borrowed by other people. How do

Danny Meyer (33:28)
Well

Bruce (33:28)
you feel about that?

Danny Meyer (33:29)
what could feel better actually? So, you know, we have my wife Audrey and I have four kids. and what could be better for us than the values we try to imbue in our kids that they go into the world and do great things with them? And look, there’s absolutely nothing more rewarding to me than when I go to a restaurant,

Danny Meyer (33:52)
Or anywhere and people say, Your book has actually helped me see things differently. And then what Will has done is to take it quite a few steps further and created a whole career based on this. And and he’s if anything, he’s overly generous in crediting what he learned while he was with us, in terms of his philosophy. So feels good.

Bruce (34:16)
Now it was 20 years between these two books. Can we expect another edition in 2046? How you feeling about that?

Danny Meyer (34:25)
You know what? That’s like asking someone after they’ve eaten way too much food on Christmas dinner if they feel like going shopping for more food. I’m a little full right now. This this book, I put everything I have into this, which I did with setting the table as well. And I’m I’m kind of full right now, so I’m not thinking about the next meal.

Bruce (34:47)
Well, you’ve left us full as well. I’m immensely grateful that you’ve taken the time, firstly, to write this follow-up book to such a big favourite, and secondly, to talk to us here. Thank you so much.

Danny Meyer (34:58)
Thank you for inviting me and and and what a gift to get to meet your audience as well.