Andrew Mackie, business catalyst

Gordon Ramsay, restaurant catalyst

I love watching the UK version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, a TV show featuring one of the world’s most successful chefs delivering weeklong, intense and foul-mouthed crash courses on how to run a restaurant for those who desperately need it.

Here’s the first ten minutes of one episode:

Gordon follows more or less the same consulting method each episode:

1. Visit as a customer
Gordon visits, tries the food & samples the service. He provides critical feedback, pulling no punches, to the assembled owner and staff.

2. Obtain commitment to change
Gordon shows how bad things really are and obtains commitment from everyone to change.

3. Observe staff
Gordon steps into the kitchen and watches the chefs and service staff at work. Typically owners haven’t put systems in place either in service or the kitchen, don’t have properly trained staff and don’t have enough experience to improve the situation.

4. Demonstrate viability
Most owners cannot go much further financially and have reached desperation point. Gordon demonstrates how the business can be turned around, sometimes running trials to show how much money can be made.

5. Inject business sense
Gordon puts systems in place across the restaurant, leverages relationships to get better deals on business inputs and finds contra deal opportunities such as cross-promotion.

6. Rebuild passion
Usually the staff have wallowed in mediocrity for so long that they’ve lost all interest in their job. Gordon works with them to restore “passion, care, attention & love for food”.

7. Provide focus
Typically the restaurant has an inconsistent theme and a menu without focus. Gordon says "a good restaurant does one thing brilliantly, a bad one does fifty badly" and typically cuts the menu down to 5 excellent (& simple to prepare) dishes per course.

8. Restore confidence
Gordon often provides the staff with a surprise challenge that irons out problems in the kitchen and restores confidence of the staff and owner.

9. Consolidate the learning
Gordon observes staff on a busy night, irons out remaining bugs in the system.

10. Find replacement staff
Some staff cannot change or do not have the owner’s interests at heart. Gordon provides the owners with the courage to get rid of them and finds qualified replacements.

11. Leave
Gordon Ramsay know how to make a number of small changes to achieve significant outcomes. Then he hands control back to the thankful owner and leaves.

So that’s Gordon Ramsay’s method. It’s good advice for any type of business and entertaining to boot.

Beware the second-order solution.

I have a great party trick – I can catch almost anything that I accidentally drop. My ability to catch is only a second-order solution, however - it's a response to a first-order problem of clumsiness. Really I should try and overcome my clumsiness but for now it's easier to catch things and wear the odd breakage.

I'm not alone - many businesses have sexy, fun or easy second-order solutions to first-order problems. It’s sexier to make new sales than it is to invoice on time and chase bad debts. It’s more fun to chase new customers than to take care of existing customers and generate repeat business. In a public company it's easier to boost the share price by making grand announcements than by working hard to increasing company profits.

Beware the sexy, fun or easy second-order solution - the only long-term strategy is to knuckle down and fix your first order problem.

When to satisfice

Satisficing was a term coined by Nobel-prize winning economist Herbert Simon for a decision-making strategy that combines satisfaction and sufficing. Put simply it means selecting the first choice that meets your predetermined criteria rather than continuing to search for the optimal choice.

In the book The Paradox of Choice (Why more is less), author Barry Schwartz gives an excellent and well-researched account of the negative impact that excessive choice has on our wellbeing. He strongly recommends satisficing when making personal decisions so as to be more satisfied in life. For a teaser of the book (which doesn't do the book justice) he has written this ChangeThis.com manifesto: 'The Paradox Of Choice' manifesto

By comparison, Matthew E. May - author of the book The Elegant Solution has a must-read ChangeThis.com manifesto on innovation that calls satisficing the fourth of the 'Seven Sins of Solution' - sufficing causes innovators to accept a 'good enough' solution rather than pushing through to find the best: The 'Mind Of The Innovator' manifesto

So - when making a personal decision, satisfice. When solving a problem, optimise / maximise.

Eradicating bad behaviour

Seth pointed us to The Technium recently, and there’s a wealth of considered opinion there. Believing the impossible has struck me deeply – a piece on how Kevin Kelly had thought Wikipedia would never work but ‘despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better’. The following comment in particular has kept me thinking:

“It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues.

Most solutions seeking to prevent malicious behaviour do so by limiting opportunity – passwords, permissions, encryption, etc in the connected world and locks, alarms, security guards, police & incarceration in the physical world – and people with motive invariably find a way around them.

Wikipedia has instead incorporated a simple, single function that has all but eliminated the motive ('to have my vandalism seen by others'), allowing them to make their content freely editable by an anonymous public. This may look obvious in retrospect – good solutions invariably do - but it’s a remarkable achievement.

FreeMind & The Completeness Method

I recommend Freemind, mind-mapping freeware, to everyone. I use it for:

• brainstorming – alone, in a team or with clients,
• planning – business, documents, presentations, this blog, and
• completeness – strategy & problem-solving.

Of the three uses – brainstorming, planning and completeness, it’s the latter that's probably most overlooked in a given situation. I use a powerful technique that Dave Hunt of Straterjee taught me a couple of years ago.

The idea is to take a problem and break it down in stages, creating a complete list of possibilities at each level. If, for instance, your problem/challenge is to generate a higher profit, there are typically only two broad possibilities – to increase your revenue or lower your costs - so you enter this in Freemind:

Then you look at all the ways to increase revenue – more sales, higher price, etc. Following that you look at all the ways to generate more sales - more customers, more sales per customer, etc.: 

As a non-linear thinker I jump between levels without necessarily completing any one level first, with FreeMind allowing me to move or regroup ideas as necessary. I don't stop mapping until I have a complete view of the problem, down to the Nth degree - as far as it needs to be taken to assess my problem. I finish with a review discussion with one or more peers to see what I've missed.

If you do all of the above, you'll have a complete view of your problem - the good news is that the answers to your problem are definitely on the page. Then you can assess which solutions are the most powerful or suitable and prioritise to determine your tactics and strategy going forward.

Why Freemind? It allows me to type thoughts as quickly as I think them, then easily reorder, highlight, change or regroup them once they’re written down. You can then export your files to PDF, various web formats or as an image. You can even copy and paste the nodes into MS Word to make headings for your document. Even better, it’s free and being Java it works on both PC and Mac.

To get the most of the software and work quickly when brainstorming you’ll need to learn some shortcuts, particularly:

[insert] to add a child node
[enter] to enter a sibling node (below)
[shift+enter] for a previous sibling node (above)
[F5] for a bright red node
[F1] for the default node style
[Alt]+[PgUp] to collapse a node
[Alt]+[PgDn] to expand a node

Try it – you’ll love it (or your money back).