More on the best bacon on Earth

I don’t want my last piece to leave a wrong impression, Carmen Berzatto is a terrible manager. ‘The Bear’ shows that even bad leaders can achieve great things, especially with some management fundamentals in place. Here is my take on some of the ones chef Carmy nailed.

The best bacon on Earth, a Michelin star

“If you want a star, you are gonna have to care about everything. More than anything.” — Chef Berzatto

We spoke in greater detail about this in my last piece, but foundational as it is, a brief recap is warranted: a bold, grand vision inspires, energizes, attracts, retains, aligns, and pushes teams. This is Google’s “Organize the world’s information”, Tesla’s “Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy”, and The Bear’s “Give them the best bacon on Earth”. This is the purpose that fuels people’s sense of joy and fulfillment, this is the ‘why’ before we code well, paint well, clean forks well, negotiate well, cook well. This is the driver.

In order for it to work, it must be genuine, true to the company and the team. It must be bold, greater than any individual contributor. It must be clearly articulated and easy to communicate. We must obsess about it. We must commit to it. More than anything. No startup is too small to have it. No corporation is too big to leverage it. No one is too great to sustainably thrive in the absence of it.

I am here because I can learn from you

“There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training.” — Ben Horowitz

Having inherited his team from a dysfunctional burger joint, Carmen was especially aware that he would need more than just lofty goals and some inspiration to get a Michelin star. He implemented a strong culture of apprenticeship, training, constant feedback and relentless, continuous improvement. This works (much) better when people have a reason to learn, which takes us to the first fundamental, but it may also be effective on its own.

Whenever someone asks me or my McKinsey colleagues why we are at the Firm, personal and professional development is rarely left unmentioned. I have never been at a place that takes training as seriously as they do. From day 1, they teach you everything you need to know, from submitting a reimbursement claim to performing complex analysis and communicating the findings to CEOs. They give you feedback on a daily basis, formally and informally. They take you to educational sessions in Europe. They pay for your graduate school. They do this to everyone, from the intern to the senior partner. They are better at this than all three Universities I have attended. In training you, they make you accountable (inexcusable even), and they fire you up, because good people strive to learn and get better. Craftsmanship excites!

I know that this is (or should be) standard business wisdom, but no other company I have worked with approaches training anywhere nearly as well as they do it. So I thought I’d bring a few practical tips from ‘The Bear’ and beyond:

1. Know what to train for: at The Beef, it was discipline and cooking skills, at Dasa, it was presentations — sometimes your team’s training needs are screaming at your face, all you need is to pay attention to what frustrates you the most in their work. A second step is conceptualizing what each job requires, which can be learned through conversations, observations and reflections. These are two efficient ways to design general, mass-oriented training programs. Lastly, offer individualized options that cater to a team member’s specific gaps or wishes. This is less efficient, but pays off in the form of disproportionately high motivation and increased effectiveness.

2. Know how to train: some issues require formal programs, others require day-to-day feedback, some require coaching, others require shadowing. The most obvious options you already know: online platforms, graduate and undergraduate courses, short in-person trainings etc. Carmen did send his people to university, which had a refreshing effect on the team, but two other methods were particularly insightful on his approach:

   1. Mentoring: direct and close mentoring may be the most efficient and most effective way to elevate someone’s skills. On Horowitz’s words: “the best in the house should train on what they do best.”, which can serve as a badge of honor for those offering their time to refine the colleagues’ skills. This, of course, requires you to know who is good at what and who needs to learn it, which is a great collateral to the primary effort.

   2. Benchmarking: knowing what great looks like can be unforgettably eye-opening. Sometimes you don’t have the best in house or your “home saints don’t perform miracles”, as we say in Brazil. For whatever reason, sending your team members to observe how the very best in the field do what they do can be transformational. On ‘The Bear’, Marcus was sent to Denmark, where he learned the art of making phenomenal deserts, and Richie was sent to a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Chicago, where he observed the rigorous operations and the strong culture that formed the backbone of the machine that delivered not only excellent food but also delightful experiences.

3. Standards and procedures: having high standards, consistently measuring against those standards and closing the loop with compelling feedback is the best way to show your team that they need to be trained. This is hard work — it requires you to not only feel that something is subpar, but to reflect and clearly conceptualize what exactly should be improved (few managers are naturals at this, they too must be trained). McKinsey became particularly effective at this by establishing a robust process conducted by an evaluator who is familiar with the job and never interacted with the consultant being assessed. The evaluator knows what questions and to whom to ask, thoroughly compiling feedback and providing an actionable synthesis to the team member in question. This ensures that evaluations are not anyone’s side job, they are someone’s core responsibility supported by a tested and tried method.

I anticipate at least one excuse you may tell yourself not to invest in training: you don’t have time. I know, it takes time and energy to get this right. I will leave you with Ben Horowitz again: “Being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat.”

This is my station

A family friend runs a medium-sized business in the countryside of Brazil, where we own a farm. They operate a fleet of 10 or so small trucks and used to complain about their high maintenance costs all the time, he thought his employees were careless and sometimes reckless. He decided to run an experiment: he would sell the trucks to the employees with greatly subsidized financing and pay them a rent for the deployment of their vehicles at work. Unsurprisingly to him, maintenance costs plummeted, not due to employee negligence, but rather because they started caring — such is the power of ownership!

A similar effect is observed on ‘The Bear’. Initially a chaotic amalgam of shared responsibilities, they implemented a “French kitchen”, with clearly defined roles and individually owned and operated stations, for which each chef would be entirely and solely responsible. All of a sudden, not only were they more efficient, but the kitchen was clean, and the food was better. This kind of ownership and the accountability that follows is one of the reasons why Jeff Bezos insists on keeping Amazon teams small. This is probably the one cultural element shared across all the great organizations I have worked with — at Tesla, every little process must have a name attached to it; at AB InBev, people literally call themselves owners of whatever they oversee; at McKinsey, even interns own a work front.

What happens when there is no ownership? First, there is no accountability. Do you know who to call if you have a question about the quality of any part of the work? To whom will you give feedback if something is not ideal? How will anyone know that an output is a result of their effort and therefore reflects their skill level, that is, how will they know whether or not they need to improve on anything? Second, there are no incentives, or they are misaligned. Who gets the credit when something is excellent? Who cares about the long-term consequences of anything if there are no names attached to the product to remind people of who is responsible for it in the first place? Who cares?

Beyond incentives, no ownership means no motivation. During medical school, I did a couple rotations at Harvard, one of which at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Offering the starkest contrast to my experience at home, at BCH I was responsible for nearly nothing. I presented one or two cases a day during rounds, but rather than that, I was a wallflower — all I did was observe. I was barely allowed to touch the patients, I wasn’t allowed to speak with parents, I didn’t do any procedures, in summary, nothing would change if I got run-over by a bus on my way to the hospital. It sucked! I was learning, we had an inspirational goal (“Until every child is well”), and I was rotating at the coolest place, the coolest school, with the coolest team on Earth. And I hated it. I hated it because although all other boxes were checked, I was completely useless, and it is better to feel useless in bed.

“Every second counts”

Carmen was obsessed, he iterated over and over again to ensure that a plate would go through all the stations in his kitchen in less than 5 seconds. He was stuck at 7. In Denmark, an iconic sign hung on the kitchen wall reminding everyone that “every second counts”. There was tape reading “sense of urgency” on the balcony. The truth is that it didn’t really matter if plates took 2 extra seconds to go through every hand in the kitchen. But it did.

It did because, again, cultural elements are infectious and it is easier to consistently obsessed over them even when they might seem unimportant than to partially nurture them in crucial moments. Sense of urgency organizes teams, keeps everyone looking for ways to improve their routines, to become more efficient. It gives people a reason to do the work today, not tomorrow, even when they know that a day won’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things. And speed matters. It matters from a service perspective — customers will be delighted if their order reaches their tables surprisingly quickly. It matters from a business perspective — faster means less costly. It matters from a human performance perspective — we mysteriously do better when time matters.

Just be cautious: there is a distinction between sense of urgency and impatience or rush. No sense of urgency ever prevented Carmy from sending a bad dish back to the kitchen, and, as Jeff Bezos says, we must be choosy, work hard and stay patiently focused on the long term.

***

"If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great."