Reading On The Plane

I travel a lot and I love it. Airplanes give me loads of time to read, and so, every once in while I want to introduce you to something I have read.  The book is Oren Harari’s Break from the Pack. I thought this was so good that I bought it for my entire management team to read and discuss.  I frequently buy my team books, but this is the first one that they really wanted to sit down and talk about, for 4 full hours.

To summarize the book would do it an injustice, so I am going to cover a couple of points that stood out to me.

Break from the pack by:

* Creating something that can not be easily duplicated

* Defining and leading the agenda for your business

* Not just responding to your customers but leading them

I think these points are so important in restaurants and hotels. Sometimes it seems like it is impossible to come up with something new and different, but unique and sometimes even startling ideas seems to emerge somewhere. What can you do that is not easily duplicated? For some restaurants it has been a celebrity chef, some unique products from local growers, a special location and view, or an emphasis on a massive wine list or beer list. As a company you must ask yourself the same question, what do we do that cannot be easily duplicated? This is the question we are constantly asking ourselves both on the design side, but on the operating side of our business.

Defining and leading the agenda for your business: who would have ever guessed 15 years ago, as Mr. Harari points out, that we would all be standing in lines to pay $4 for a coffee drink. Foresight and leadership into areas that are unseen is the mark of breaking from the pack without the ability to see where the market is going leads to stagnation and failure. All you have to do is walk into most hotel restaurants to see this. It is good to see Bill Marriott teaming up with Ian Schrager as an example of trying to move a behemoth of a company into a new direction, or Six Senses Hotels and Resorts as they try to lead the way with sensitive, local and sustainable developments.

Lastly, the one I appreciate the most, as this is the most difficult, is leading your customers–not just responding to them. Years ago we had a designer who frequently came to me and said that our client had told him to do something that went against what we knew, from experience, was the right choice. I told him that he was wrong to just accept that the customer is always right, and that his responsibility was to tell the customer the right thing to do. We, by the way, have a company rule that you tell customers three times what you think is right and explain why. If after the third time they don’t listen, then you abandon the idea. This is truly the hardest thing to do, on the other hand when you can really support your client by bringing to bear the breath of experience and it works, that is the best.