1: “You’re not being realistic,” someone would tell Will Guidara and Daniel Humm.
“You’re being unreasonable.”
“That word ‘unreasonable’ was meant to shut us down—to end the conversation, as it so often does,” Will writes in his book Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect.
“Instead,” he says, “it started one, and became our call to arms.”
Daniel and Will were partners in the New York City restaurant Eleven Madison Park. In 2017, eleven years after meeting, the pair achieved the highest honor in dining when their restaurant was crowned No. 1 in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
“Daniel’s food was extraordinary; he was undeniably one of the best chefs in the world,” Will writes. But the secret to the duo’s success was not just the quality of the food.
Their vision was to “become a restaurant focused passionately, intentionally, wholeheartedly on connection and graciousness—on giving both the people on our team and the people we served a sense of belonging.”
They believed “how they served their clients was as valuable as what they served,” he writes. He says: “Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.”
2: The phrase they used to capture this radical idea of what the guest experience could be was “unreasonable hospitality.”
“Because no one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable,” Will writes. “Serena Williams. Walt Disney. Steve Jobs. Martin Scorsese. Prince. Look across every discipline, in every arena—sports, entertainment, design, technology, finance—you need to be unreasonable to see a world that doesn’t yet exist.
“Chefs at the finest restaurants in the world had long been celebrated for being unreasonable about the food they served,” he observes. “At Eleven Madison Park, we came to realize the remarkable power of being unreasonable about how we made people feel.”
When interviewing someone for a potential job with the restaurant, one of Will’s favorite questions to ask is: “What’s the difference between service and hospitality?”
His favorite answer? “Service is black and white,” the candidate said. “Hospitality is color.”
“Black and white,” Will writes, “means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency; ‘color’ means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them.
“Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection—that’s hospitality.”
“We got on that 50 Best list by pursuing excellence, the black and white, attending to every detail and getting as close to perfection as we could. But we got to number one by going Technicolor—by offering hospitality so bespoke, so over the top, it can be described only as unreasonable.”
3: For many years, the American economy was predominantly about manufacturing. No longer. “Now, we’re a service economy,” Will notes, “and dramatically so—more than three-quarters of our GDP comes from service industries.”
Most workplace cultures stress hyper-efficiency. Today, “we are in the middle of a digital transformation. That transformation has enhanced many aspects of our lives, but too many companies have left the human behind. They’ve been so focused on products, they’ve forgotten about people. And while it may be impossible to quantify in financial terms the impact of making someone feel good, don’t think for a second that it doesn’t matter. In fact, it matters more.”
Whatever the industry we are in, we can make a different choice. We can choose to pursue “unreasonable hospitality.”
“Because,” Will writes, “whether a company has made the choice to put their team and their customers at the center of every decision will be what separates the great ones from the pack.”
How do we create a culture of hospitality?
By asking: “How do we make the people who work for us and the people we serve feel seen and valued? How do we give them a sense of belonging? How do we make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do we make them feel welcome?”
What happens when we create a hospitality-first culture?
“Everything about our business improves,” Will explains, “whether that means finding and retaining great talent, turning customers into raving fans, or increasing our profitability.”
And there’s more. “Hospitality is a selfish pleasure,” he notes. “It feels great to make other people feel good.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Am I settling for delivering competent “black and white” service, or am I willing to go “Technicolor” and create unforgettable human connections?
Action: Identify one way this week to go beyond efficiency—adding a personal, heartfelt touch that makes a team member or customer feel truly valued and part of something bigger.
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