Danny Meyer Quotes

Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.

The excellence reflex is a natural reaction to fix something that isn't right, or to improve something that could be better. The excellence reflex is rooted in instinct and upbringing, and then constantly honed through awareness, caring and practice. The overarching concern to do the right thing well is something we can't train for. Either it's there or it isn't.

Make new mistakes every day. Don’t waste time repeating the old ones.

In the end, what’s most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.

Her recipe for the perfect waitress was, “two parts Walter Cronkite to one part Mae West, carefully blended with a cup of Mikhail Baryshnikov and a liberal sprinkling of Mother Teresa.

For judges of character, there is no such thing as the color gray.

The only way a company can grow, stay true to its soul, and remain consistently successful is to attract, hire, and keep great people.

I have always felt that solo guests pay us the ultimate compliment by joining us for a meal. Their visit has no ulterior motive (it involves no business, romance, or socializing). These guests simply want to do something nice for themselves, chez nous. Why wouldn’t we reward that?

My appreciation of the power of hospitality and my desire to harness it have been the greatest contributors to whatever success my restaurants and businesses have had. I’ve learned how crucially important it is to put hospitality to work, first for the people who work for me and subsequently for all the other people and stakeholders who are in any way affected by our business—in descending order, our guests, community, suppliers, and investors. I call this way of setting priorities “enlightened hospitality.” It stands some more traditional business approaches on their head, but it’s the foundation of every business decision and every success we’ve had.

Policies are nothing more than guidelines to be broken for the benefit of our guests. We’re here to give the guests what they want, period.

Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It

… hospitality … is the sum of all the thoughtful, caring, gracious things out staff does to make you feel we are on your side when you are dining with us.

Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group talked about businesses having soul. He believed soul was what made a business great, or even worth doing at all. “A business without soul is not something I’m interested in working at,” he said. He suggested that the soul of a business grew out of the relationships a company developed as it went along. “Soul can’t exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, ‘Here’s a value proposition that I believe in. Here’s where I’m coming from. This is my point of view.’ At first, it’s a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation.

— Nossa, Alan! Que ótima notícia! — Eu me empolgo e abraço-o. Ele me aperta com força e eu me sinto protegida em seus braços. Ok, ele não é forte como o Danny, sua estrutura é magra, mas ainda assim é musculoso. Tento me afastar e ele me aperta um pouco mais. — Adoro essa sua espontaneidade. E seu perfume. E seu gosto. — Ele fala, dá um beijo e uma lambida no meu pescoço. MEU DEUS!! Esse homem quer me deixar louca! Vocês viram isso??

I’m a bottom-up manager who subscribes to the concept of “servant leadership,” as articulated by the late Robert Greenleaf. He believed that organizations are at their most effective when leaders encourage collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and empowerment. In any hierarchy, it’s clear that the ultimate boss (in my case, me) holds the most power. But a wonderful thing happens when you flip the traditional organizational chart upside down so that it looks like a V with the boss on the bottom. My job is to serve and support the next layer “above” me so that the people on that layer can then serve and support the next layer “above” them, and so on.

If people cannot ever develop into one of our top three cooks, servers, managers, or maître d’s, why would we hire them? How will they help us improve and become champions? It’s pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It’s the “whelming” candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that’s the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you raves. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can’t get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they’re comfortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired.

Finally, I ask our managers to weigh one other critical factor as they handicap the prospect. Do they believe the candidate has the capacity to become one of the top three performers on our team in his or her job category? If people cannot ever develop into one of our top three cooks, servers, managers, or maître d’s, why would we hire them? How will they help us improve and become champions? It’s pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It’s the “whelming” candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that’s the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you raves. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can’t get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they’re comfortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired. And

A friend once told me a story about an athletic display by Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. My friend, who is a very successful businessman—and, I should note, a Democrat—opened an office in Florida with about forty employees. On the day the company was incorporated, out of the blue, he received a personal phone call from Governor Bush (whom he had never met) thanking him for doing business in Florida. “Here’s a special number,” the governor said, “that I want you to use if you ever need any roads moved or bridges built for your company.” My friend remains a Democrat, but he left that transaction very impressed with Governor Bush.

Union Square Hospitality Group is another example of a small giant that got both bigger and better. Aside from O.C.Tanner, no company from the original edition of this book grew as much as USHG in the following decade, and no owner had as great a change in philosophy as Danny Meyer. “Here is the headline of my life right now: trying to use growth as the engine to build our culture, which is completely the opposite of what I always feared—that growth would hurt our culture,” he said in 2015. “I have made a 180-degree turn. I now see that sensible, well-paced growth is essential to advance your culture. Because culture needs to grow. The worst thing you can do is to try and maintain culture.

I’ve made much more money by choosing the right things to say no to than by choosing things to say yes to,” said restaurateur Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group, and he could have been speaking for others. “I measure it by the money I haven’t lost and the quality I haven’t sacrificed

To me, a 51 percenter has five core emotional skills. I’ve learned that we need to hire employees with these skills if we’re to be champions at the team sport of hospitality. They are: Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full) Intelligence (not just “smarts” but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning) Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done) Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel) Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment)

There us no point for me … to work every day for the purpose of offering guests an average experience.

Nothing would ever matter more to me than how we expressed hospitality to one another.

Every business needs a core strategy to be what I call always on the improve, for us it's constant, gentle pressure.

Change works only when people believe it is happening for them, not to them.

But the worst mistake is not to figure out some way to end up in a better place after having made a mistake. We call that 'writing a great last chapter.

Why do we care for our stakeholders in this particular order? The interests of our own employees must be placed directly ahead of those of our guests because the only way we can consistently earn raves, win repeat business, and develop bonds of loyalty with our guests is first to ensure that our own team members feel jazzed about coming to work. Being jazzed is a combination of feeling motivated, enthusiastic, confident, proud, and at peace with the choice to work on our team.

Nice gets nice.

But the fact that something is free alone doesn't make it wise or compelling to proceed.

Doing two things like a half-wit never equals doing one thing like a whole wit.

Previous success in any field invites high expectations and scrutiny the next time around. People are less forgiving when a winner falters than they are when an up-and-comer stumbles. But a mark of a champion is to welcome scrutiny, persevere, perform beyond expectations, and provide an exceptional product—for which forgiveness is not necessary.

THE FOUNDER OF ANY new business has an opportunity to initiate the first expression of that business’s point of view through a compendium of aesthetic and philosophical choices.

I have taken from the continued success of Union Square Café is that willingness to overcome difficult circumstances is a crucial character trait in my employees, partners, and restaurants.

I was developing what I would call an "athletic" approach to hospitality, sometimes playing offense, sometimes playing defense, but always wanting to find a way to win. ... The point is to keep the dialogue open while sending the message: I am your agent, not the gatekeeper!

To go through the motions in a perfunctory or self-absorbed manner, no matter how expertly rendered, diminishes the beauty. It's about soul—and service without soul, no matter how elegant, is quickly forgotten by the guest.

In hospitality one size fits one!

People duck as a natural reflex when something is hurled at them. Similarly, the excellence reflex is a natural reaction to fix something that isn’t right, or to improve something that could be better. The excellence reflex is rooted in instinct and upbringing, and then constantly honed through awareness, caring, and practice. The overarching concern to do the right thing well is something we can’t train for. Either it’s there or it isn’t. So we need to train how to hire for it.

Communication is at the root of all business strengths—and weaknesses. When things go wrong and employees become upset, whether at a restaurant, a law firm, a hardware store, a university, or a major corporation, nine times out of ten the justifiable complaint is, “We need to communicate more effectively.” I admit that for many years, I didn’t really know what this meant. I had no problem standing up in front of a group to give a talk. I thought I was a pretty good communicator, but then it dawned on me: communicating has as much to do with context as it does content. That’s called setting the table. Understanding who needs to know what, when people need to know it, and why, and then presenting that information in an entirely comprehensible way is a sine qua non of great leadership. Clear, timely communication is the key to applying constant, gentle pressure. To illustrate the point, I teach our managers about the “lily pad” theory. Imagine a pond filled with lily pads and a frog perched serenely atop each one. For the fun of it, a little boy tosses a small pebble into the water, which breaks the surface of the pond but causes just a tiny ripple. The frogs barely notice, and don’t budge. Enjoying himself, the boy next tosses a larger stone into the center of the pond, sending stronger ripples that cause all of the lily pads to rock and tilt. Some frogs jump off their lily pads, while others cling to avoid falling off. But the ripples affect them all. Not content, the boy then hurls a huge rock, which creates a wave that knocks each and every frog into the water. Some frogs are frightened. All are angry (assuming that frogs get angry). If only the frogs had had some warning about the impending rock toss, each one could have timed its jump so that the wave would have had no serious impact. Grasping the lily pad theory and training yourself and your managers to implement it prevents many, if not all, communication problems.