A Leading Restaurateur on What It Takes to Scale a Winning Culture
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
Allison Beard. I'm Adi Ignatius and this is the HBR Idea Cast. See when a business is small, building a great corporate culture can feel relatively straightforward. You know, leaders are close to their employees and customers, they can see what's happening on the front lines and intervene when something feels off. But what happens when the organization gets much, much bigger? This is a classic business dilemma. And I think a lot of companies get it wrong even though they understand the risk, right? They make tradeoffs for efficiency and profitability, they add layers management, they forget about what made the business special in the first place.
Exactly. So joining me today is Danny Meyer, the restaurateur who founded and scaled Shake Shack, as well as an acclaimed fine dining group, and the author of a new book called What Could Possibly Go Right. the essential journey to scale an enduring culture. In an extremely demanding industry, we're talking about Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurants to a global burger chain. He's stayed successful for decades, but he's also really candid about the mistakes that he's made and corrected along the way. I talked with him about the building blocks of a strong organizational culture, the frameworks he uses to ensure that diverse, dispersed teams stay on the same page, and when a leader should step in versus step back. Here's our conversation. So when you first started out
With your first restaurant, Union Square Cafe. How did you articulate the culture that you wanted to create and get the team to successfully execute on it? I didn't. I d I never articulated anything to anybody. Because I didn't know the first thing about Opening a restaurant, starting a business.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (32 minutes, 5,409 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.