I’ve been saying for years that the biggest threat to the independent restaurant operator isn’t the chain across the street. It isn’t food cost. It isn’t labor. It isn’t even the third-party delivery platform taking 30 points off the top.It’s...

For decades, the AI and leadership conversation has been framed as human vs. machine. Which tasks will AI replace. Which skills will remain relevant. Whether leaders will be optimized out of existence or elevated by the tools available to them.I’ve...

There’s a concept in design called the Rorschach test. Show someone an inkblot and what they see reveals something about how they think, not about what’s actually there.The restaurant industry has its own version.Show a struggling restaurant to a systems...

A bankruptcy court just approved the breakup of Fat Brands across four separate transactions. Eighteen restaurant chains. $1.4 billion in debt. One concept shut down entirely before the sale was even complete. Thirteen brands handed to the lenders who financed...

There is no feeling in this business quite like a full dining room.Tables occupied. Conversations overlapping. The pass moving. The cast in rhythm. The kind of energy that makes you forget, for a few hours, everything that keeps you up...

After 44 years in this business, I still ask questions to anyone with a pulse in the operation.Not because I lack confidence in my own judgment. Because I understand something that took me longer than I’d like to admit to...

In 2002, Larry Bossidy — the man who turned AlliedSignal into a reliable earnings machine and then came back to rescue Honeywell — published a book called Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. He spent the better part of his...

Ram Charan has advised GE, DuPont, Novartis, Home Depot, and Verizon. He spent 35 years as one of the world’s foremost leadership consultants, on the road 365 days a year, inside the organizations that define how business gets done at...

In 1996, a biologist named Stuart Kauffman published a theory about how complex systems — cells, ecosystems, economies — organize themselves. His central finding: the most adaptive, highest-performing systems do not operate in perfect order. They do not operate in...

There is a concept in complexity science called entrainment of thinking. It describes what happens when ideas and practices that have proven effective in the past become accepted norms — acquiring inertia, becoming invisible, becoming impossible to question not because...