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In Simon Sinek’s book, “The Infinite Game,” he talks about the concept of worthy rivals. That we should, with intention, choose someone who we respect, who in some ways we look up to, who in many ways we learn things from and compete against them. Because rivals make us better.
As we were coming up at Eleven Madison Park our worthy rival was another restaurant in New York called Per Se who in pretty much every way was objectively better than us. And so twice a year, every single year, I’d go to Per Se to have dinner. And one meal I had there was perfect. But at the very end, I ordered coffee, and the coffee was just, well, fine. Which on its own wouldn’t have stood out except that it was fine following a meal where everything else had been so perfect.
That night I was writing in my journal which is a practice that I have. It’s been a way for me to grab on to moments of inspiration. That night it was about looking over the course of the meal I had just enjoyed and as I was journaling I got to that cup of coffee. The more I thought about it, the more it became clear why that coffee was not that good. In restaurants, in nice restaurants, the beverage director is the person that manages all of the beverages, the wine, the cocktails, the beer, the coffee, and the tea. And yet, almost always, this is a person who is passionate about wine, which is, in most restaurants, the most important beverage program. So it’s no surprise that the coffee wasn’t that good. It was being run by someone who was not passionate about coffee.
I thought about our restaurant, it worked the exact same way. And yet, I had a team of people who could care less about wine. The things they were passionate for were coffee and beer and tea and cocktails. So in the months that followed, I took all of those programs off my wine director’s plate and redistributed them to other people on the team. A busboy took on the coffee program. A food runner took on the beer program. A server took on the tea program. In doing that, a couple things happened. First, I had reallocated responsibility based on passion, not position. And I gave every one of those programs the ability to thrive because an individual was solely focused on them and them alone.
Within the next year, and I say this without exaggeration, each one of those programs: coffee, tea, beer, and cocktails had all received an award from some reputable source for being one of the best of their kind in the country. And the wine program got better as well because the wine director was no longer distracted by things they were not passionate about.