Book Summary of Unreasonable Hospitality

I just finished reading “Unreasonable Hospitality — The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect” by Will Guidara. This book was fantastic! It was written by the restaurateur behind Eleven Madison Park, one of the best restaurants in the world. This book is a master class on leadership, corporate cultures and career development. In this post I will share my top takeaways from the book in each of these areas.

Leadership

Trust Instills Ownership: By letting people know that you trust them to do a great job you empower them to take ownership and up level their skills. When someone feels like their leadership is putting faith in them, they want to rise to the occasion and prove they deserve it. So trust people, give them responsibilities slightly beyond their current capabilities and apply a constant gentle pressure as they climb.

Set a Ridiculously High Bar: Holding a nearly unachievable high bar and being demanding is actually a gift to your team. People are filled up by doing great work and striving towards mastery. If the bar is set at what feels comfortably achievable, people will feel bored — it’s only through being nearly unreasonable demanding in pursuit of near perfection can you inspire people.

Care About People and Product, But Care More About Product: A good leader needs to really care about their people and the thing they are building. But having an amazing product is a necessary precondition for having satisfied workers — talented people don’t want to work on crap. So ultimately, if forced to pick between the success of the product or the wellbeing of the people you should pick the success of the product; it’s only by having a great product that you can attract and keep great people.

Direct, Early, Private Feedback: Constructive feedback is a gift. It’s an opportunity to partner with someone to help them grow. It should be given directly without sugarcoating it, it should be given early on so that emotions around the feedback do not build up and it should be given in private.

Have a Core: A leader cannot try to please everyone or do everything. A leader needs to have a strong point of view that others can lean on. Being a people pleaser and saying yes to everything means you don’t have a core and your team has nothing to lean on. Having a core means you are going to say no to people and upset them; but having a core and standing for something is better than trying to please everyone.

Culture

Sweat the Small Stuff: It’s important to create a culture in which really caring is cool and the smallest details of craftsmanship are obsessed over. Really caring about the little things has two important effects. First, it’s just about impossible to care about the little things without infusing that care into every part of the business. Second, customers can feel it when a product is built by people who really care. Even if the customer cannot identify every detail, there is a certain feeling people get when using a product developed with an obsession to craftsmanship — there is a reason Airbnb feels good to use and banking apps make you feel sad.

Own the P&L: As an individual contributor within a company it’s easy to not feel a sense of personal ownership for a company’s P&L. But this is a mistake. Every employee at a company has a responsibility to be good stewards of the company’s money. This matters because pennies really do add up when this mentality is instilled across a company.

Conflicting Priorities Are Good: There should be competing goals within a company. When priorities conflict with each other, people are forced to innovate. As an employee it can feel tempting to think that the presence of conflicting goals means a plan was designed badly or that organizational structures need to change — but this is the wrong way to think about it. Conflicting goals create tension between multiple good things, thereby forcing innovation and more thoughtful tradeoffs around priorities.

Career

Avoid Consensus: Trying to get 100% consensus on a proposal from everyone that is partially involved is a failure mode, not a win! Building this much consensus takes valuable time away from actually doing the work and getting to 100% consensus likely means you are not taking enough risk. It’s important to have a bias towards action and to aggressively try to reduce the number of people you consider blocking reviewers on proposal. Moving ahead with a proposal even when not everyone agrees is a sign you are being bold, taking risk, having a core and standing for something. Don’t take this to far by being a contrarian on everything, that is just like getting consensus on everything but with the sign bit flipped — but really do try to push hard enough that you don’t get 100% consensus on everything you do.

Ease In: When you join a new organization don’t be afraid to start at the bottom doing “grunt” work. It’s better to ease into an organization before trying to make change, than it is to come in like a cannonball. Easing in will give you time to learn the fabric of the organization, build empthy, figure out where the footguns are, build allies and find your footing upon which you can ultimately push for change.

Work is Like Relationships: Relationship skills matter in the workplace. This might seem obvious but somehow it’s easy to think that the skills used in marriage or friendship are just not applicable to the workplace… this is not the case. In the workplace use your basic relationship skills — say sorry when you are wrong, listen to people earnestly trying to understand them and let people know that you appreciate them.

Treat Constructive Feedback as a Gift: When someone gives you hard feedback, receive it with grace and appreciation (even if you do not agree with it). Giving constructive feedback really is a gift and it can be hard for someone to do. If you receive their hard feedback with dismissal they are very unlikely to give you another chance to receive this gift in the future.

Delegation Sucks… At First: Delegating a task to someone more junior really can suck at first. They are going do it slower than you, they are going to make mistakes and cost you your time. But its only through delegation that junior folks get opportunities to grow, and senior folks free up new time to push their boundaries on new types of problems. So take on the work of delegating and do it before you think you need to. If you wait to delegate until its absolutely required, it will be too late because in that crisis state you won’t do a good job ramping up a new person.

Do Less and Do It Well: Say no to things so that you can double down on doing a few important things really well rather than trying to do a little bit of everything. You are better off doing less at a ridiculously high standard of craftsmanship, than doing more and letting slippage into our work.

Find Your Escape: Find something outside of work that enables you to completely disconnect from work. A mentor of mine at work says that he goes golfing at least once a week because this gives him a few hours of time to 100% disconnect from work. This enables him to recharge and come back to work with a fresh perspective.

Falling is Part of Learning: You want to be failing sometimes at work. If you are not failing it means you are not learning. So take the lack of failing as an indication that you are not pushing hard enough. In my personal case, this piece of advice likely means I need to go for a promotion at work because I am getting a little comfortable in my current level. I need to enter a new level in which the bar is set higher and I am failing more often.

Start With the End Goal: When you are designing a solution to a problem, if you start by limiting yourself to what is practical you won’t be able to confident you are moving in the right direction. If instead, if you start by throwing practicality out the window, focusing on the northstar and working backwards towards practicality from there, you can be much more confident you are directionally correct.

Personal Applications

There is so much I took away from this book. Here are some of things that I am interested in exploring trying in my own life in response to this book.

• Trying to play badminton once a week as a method to completely disconnect from work.
• Go for a promotion at work as a method of taking more risk and hopefully failing a bit more. Learning requires failure, and I am not failing enough right now.
• Instill a sense of ownership in my junior reports by telling them that I trust them, giving them tasks that push the boundaries of their capabilities, providing them with gentle pressure and giving direct feedback early.
• I am too much of a people pleaser and care too much about getting consensus. I need to have more of a core, take on more risk and worry less about trying to please everyone. One tactical way in which I am going to do this is by including fewer reviewers on design documents I write.
• As part of being a people pleaser I say yes to too many things at work. I need to have a core about the things I consider truly important, double down on those things and say no to other things. By having a core and being strongly opinionated about what things matter I give my junior engineers something durable to lean on.
• Thinking about cost is not a fun part of software engineering, but the fact is running servers costs money and that money counts directly against the P&L. So even though its not fun, taking the time to be responsible about the number of servers I spin up, avoiding waste and looking for opportunities to save money is part of my job. I should embrace this as an opportunity.