How to build a great culture with restaurateur Danny Meyer (Transcript)

ReThinking with Adam Grant
How to build a great culture with restaurateur Danny Meyer

August 6, 2024

[00:00:00] Danny Meyer: 

More than anything your job is gonna be to do so many thoughtful things for each other that by the end of the day you're gonna go, “That was like playing tennis with some really good friends.”


[00:00:13] Adam Grant: 

Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective.

I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Danny Meyer, founder of Shake Shack and the Union Square Hospitality Group. He joined me for a live conversation at the Wharton People Analytics Conference where we dug into how to foster a healthy work environment. Danny's an ideal person for that discussion. He's one of my role models for building a culture of generosity.


[00:00:50] Danny Meyer: 

I, I will tell you time and time again while we can fake it. If our team is not feeling jazzed, coming to work and feeling motivated by being surrounded by people with whom they have lots and lots of respect and trust, you will taste that. It will, your food will not taste as good. The hospitality will not be as good.


[00:01:11] Adam Grant: 

Danny's book Setting the Table, is a must read for anyone who cares about food, hospitality, and service or leadership. And this conversation will definitely give you a taste of what makes him a great boss.

Danny, welcome back to Wharton. 


[00:01:37] Danny Meyer: 

Great to be here. 


[00:01:38] Adam Grant: 

Danny. I think that what a lot of people don't realize is you've not just been a pioneer in the way that you've made food. You've also transformed the way that a lot of people think about frontline work culture, and that's a big part of what, what we wanna talk about today.

So can you start just by telling us a little bit about your founding philosophy of how did you decide what you wanted your values to be as, as a restaurateur? 


[00:01:58] Danny Meyer:

I think my founding philosophy was born out of my own insecurity. Um, I was 27 when I opened Union Square Cafe and I had only been anyone's boss before that once in my life, I'd been a salesman. 

I was one of these people that was supposed to be a lawyer, took my LSAT. Never applied to law school after that, but the only other time I had ever been anyone's boss before that was working on a political campaign of a guy named John Anderson who ran as the independent presidential candidate in 1980 against Reagan and Carter. 

Obviously he lost as all independent candidates do. I had about 25 people reporting to me and they were all volunteers, so I didn't have the opportunity to give anyone a raise, couldn't dock anyone their pay, couldn't give anyone a bonus. A hundred percent of how I had to motivate people was, was the higher purpose of why we were all doing this.

Really foundational experience. I then opened Union Square Cafe at the age of 27. Half the people working for me were older than I was, and so when I talk about insecurity, I, I had this awful affliction that I think a lot of first time leaders have, which is it was far more important for me to be liked than to command respect from people.

And without knowing it, I was unintentionally but intuitively adopting servant leadership. And I went to work every day for the purpose of making those guys feel successful and appropriating what I had learned from the political campaign, which was, and give them a reason over and beyond their job to want to come to work.


[00:03:37] Adam Grant: 

I love that. What, what was the reason? 


[00:03:39] Danny Meyer: 

The purpose was that we wanted to make people leave happier than however they felt when they came. Over time, we got a lot more intentional about stuff that had been just intuitive from the outset. 


[00:03:52] Adam Grant: 

I think one of the, the interesting things about your early days is, culture building is easier for you now because you have a brand.

They come to Union Square or Shake Shack with a set of expectations about what you stand for. Back then, nobody knew who you were, nobody knew what you were about. How did you explain the culture you wanted to build to people? 


[00:04:09] Danny Meyer: 

Well, the fact is I didn't, is I, I went to work every single day for the first 10 years of my career, I had exactly one restaurant, Union Square Cafe, and my leadership philosophy was pretty weak.

It was, if you see me doing it, that's what I expect you to do. If I wanted you to do something, I had the awful habit in those early days of saying, “Can I ask you a favor? Excuse me, it's your job. What?”


[00:04:34] Adam Grant: 

Wait, who are you? The Godfather.


[00:04:38] Danny Meyer: 

Far from it. Yeah. I would grab people by the cheeks and say, “You see that napkin on the floor? I know you can pick it up.” And so do you. Um, so.


[00:04:50] Adam Grant: 

That's a good Godfather impression. I did not know. How would, we've known each other for a decade. I had no idea you had that in you


[00:04:56] Danny Meyer: 

Wait till you see how good I am with olive pits in my mouth. Yeah, I can really do it well. But any, anyway, uh, what happened was I finally opened a second restaurant, Gramercy Tavern.

And I was literally like a Three Stooges routine. The one where you push in one drawer and the other one comes out and you push in that drawer, whatever I got fixed at Union Square Cafe, it would be messed up at Gramercy Tavern. I was a whirling dervish. I would spend either all lunches at one restaurant, fixing things and then all dinners at the other.

Or I'd spend Monday through half of Wednesday at one and the other half of Wednesday through Friday at the other. And it finally dawned on me that the thing that we used to tell our kids when they were babies, “Use your words.” Is also a really effective thing in business and leadership. Until I started to use my words and say, “This is what I expect you to do.”

And I started taking a page out of our chef's playbook. Guess what a recipe is? It's using your words. If you follow these steps and do these things, you will get that result. I learned that when you do use your words and you use 'em from the very get go, when you're hiring someone, you tell people, “This is what success will look like when you do this kind of stuff. We're gonna be really happy. When you don't do this stuff, we're not gonna be really happy.” 

But using our words and making things really crystal clear has been the journey. And I'd say only in this last two years have we, I think, gotten it even better, which is moving from something we were really proud of for years, having family values that those were our words, right?

We came up with five family values. And by the way, those family values were, could have been anyone's family values, excellence, hospitality, entrepreneurial spirit, integrity. Right? And so two years ago we finally did something way better using our words. And we said, number one, it's not a family. Because I had gotten in a lot of trouble because whenever we would fire someone. You don't fire your family members and it would de. 


[00:06:56] Adam Grant: 

You could furlough them though. 


[00:07:00] Danny Meyer: 

Well, yeah, I guess so. That doesn't work so well if my sister didn't like it when I tried that on her. So we changed family values. It's not a family. And how do you hold someone really accountable to value? We changed that to expected behaviors and it is a business.

These are the behaviors. We now have five expected behaviors. And we do hold people accountable when we talk about those behaviors, when we hire you, when we review you, and every single meeting that we have starts with those behaviors and people know what they are. 


[00:07:31] Adam Grant: 

I love that you walked away from the family idea, because I think you're right.

It sets unrealistic expectations. I think when people say, “We're, we're creating a family here.” What they really mean is we're a community that we treat each other with respect. We have a sense of belonging. We try to make everyone feel welcome and included, but the family expectation is a little bit unreasonable.


[00:07:48] Danny Meyer: 

If you've ever worked in a restaurant before at its best, you know, you want it to kind of feel like a family, but the functional parts of the family, not the dysfunctional parts. In fact, a lot of people in the restaurant business say that they spend more time with their restaurant family than with their actual family, but it's a business and it's called a restaurant business. 

It's not called a restaurant family. And it, it was confusing to a lot of people. 


[00:08:14] Adam Grant: 

Oh, try it at your own risk. I've always loved that you had five values when you started out. Our own Drew Carton, uh, showed in a study that if you had more than five values, people had a hard time remembering them all to your point.

But also they didn't always agree on what they meant. It seemed like fewer than three was also too few to really be clear about what people stood for. Um, I think a lot of organizations have a hard time narrowing it down to five. Um, because there's a lot that you expect of people. How did you decide what the five core values were early on? 


[00:08:40] Danny Meyer: 

We started off by going to our restaurants and having meetings and asking people. I can't tell you how long it takes to get every word, right? Every word matters, not just the words that are the expected behaviors, but the way we describe 'em, because to your point, Adam, if there's the light of day between what you think I meant and what I meant.

How am I gonna hold you accountable for that? I, I just can't. It goes through a lot of iterations and then we road test it constantly and they change. So, for example, one of the expected behaviors is we played a win with a humble swagger. If you could know how much debate there was over those two words, humble swagger.


[00:09:26] Adam Grant: 

Could be an oxymoron if you're not careful. It could be. 


[00:09:28] Danny Meyer: 

Well, it is. It is. It's like jumbo shrimp, right?


[00:09:30] Adam Grant: 

I've called this confident humility for years, and the modifier of confidence isn't enough for a lot of people to think about that as a source of strength. It sounds weak, humble swagger. That's strong.

That's tough. I, I get that you're ambitious and you take pride in your work that way. 


[00:09:46] Danny Meyer: 

And I think for a lot of years, people actually heard the word hospitality. That's the name of our company, Union Square Hospitality Group. And they took it almost the way that people used to hear a nonprofit, right? If you ran a not a nonprofit, there was a sense that you weren't really out to win.

'Cause we're just a non-profit. Well, nonprofits have to be just as much on their game of accountability to have measurable results for the people who are contributing money as a for-profit. And so I learned the hard way that by talking about hospitality as much as we did. Which is important. It's crucial the way you care for people.

The way you make people feel is not an excuse to not win. As a matter of fact, that's why we had to be assertive and affirmative that winning mattered to us. 


[00:10:37] Adam Grant: 

Yeah. One of the things that that's striking to me is you have anticipated so much of what we study as a community of people, analytics, scholars and leaders.

Sometimes I sit down with you and I feel like my purpose in my job is just to give you studies and words for things you already know and have been doing for decades. What do you not know? What are the things you would love to see people in this room investigate or study? 


[00:11:02] Danny Meyer: 

I'd love to find a way to measure what we call hospitality quotient.

I don't understand why intelligence quotient is measurable, but hospitality quotient isn't. And I define hospitality quotient as the degree to which it makes someone feel better themselves when they make someone else feel even better. And like IQ, it's not a judgment. We definitely do everything we can to hire people irrespective of what a kind of a great cook they are or how great they are at suggesting wines.

We want people who have a high HQ because the motivation for their cooking should be that they made you feel better because of it, right? I don't know how to measure those things. I know how to ask questions in an interview that gets to it. I know how to use my sense of people's body language, my sense of people, but I also can tell you that I think I have a very high HQ and I think I'm in a disadvantage because I don't have a way to measure it.

I'm actually at a disadvantage when I interview a frontline worker because I shouldn't go into the interview caring how you feel to the degree that I do. That is a disadvantage and it actually makes it more likely that I'm gonna, I'm not gonna hire people with a high HQ because it mattered to me to make you feel better.

I should be thinking about, “How are you gonna make the rest of our employees feel once I hire you?” I should be thinking about, “How are you gonna make all of our, our guests, our customers feel?”


[00:12:41] Adam Grant: 

The way you described it today made me think of some work that Noah Eisenkraft did, uh, with Hillary Elfenbein, um, what they called Affective Presence, which is the question of do you have a consistent, um, set of habits around the emotions you elicit in others.

So we all know some people who light others up and some people who would be seen as annoying, they work to measure that and they found that independent of the emotions that I transmit, I consistently make other people feel certain things. But what you're adding here is that I care about my affective presence, right?

And I enjoy lifting you up, and I feel bad if I've cut you down. And that I have never seen someone study that. Um, Gregg Popovich talked about it. He said he wanted to bring players under the, under the, the Spurs who enjoyed other people's success. 


[00:13:26] Danny Meyer: 

A hundred percent of his statistics in baseball are only about what happened on the field.

And we know from baseball that half of any player's time is spent in the dugout. Right? Well, the championship teams, you can actually watch what's happening in the dugout. I don't know how to measure it, but what's happening in the dugout has everything to do with, with their HQ. Like watch what happens when a player on this team strikes out, goes back into the dugout, gets a pat on the back, you, you'll get it next time.

The other team, the guy just sits glumly on the bench afterwards and everyone kind of disassociates with him. So there's something to that, but why can't it be measured? Maybe we can get that done someday. 


[00:14:10] Adam Grant: 

So I love your interview questions. I've borrowed most of them. Talk to me about the wake that people leave and how you assess that?


[00:14:19] Danny Meyer: 

Well, the first thing is, if they come into the interview wearing a disgusting cologne, that's gonna leave a really bad wake. I actually have talked to people about that in the interview. I'm not necessarily just trying to be funny. We're in an industry where even if you don't care about restaurants that much, Adam, you're paying for how good the food tastes and how good the wine tastes.

And if there's a waiter walking through the restaurant leaving this wake of cologne, each time you take a sniff of your wine, they've ruined your meal. I, I do think that people need to understand that empathy, which is such a crucial emotional skill, which does make up a big part of having a high HQ, is often described as the ability and willingness to try to walk in the other person's shoes.


[00:15:06] Adam Grant: 

My favorite interview question that you've introduced me to is your question about the biggest misperception that other people have of you. Talk to me about what you're looking for when you ask that question? 


[00:15:14] Danny Meyer: 

That is one of my favorites as well, and you cannot answer that question unless you're willing to share the real you, the only way to answer that question is to say, “Well, I'm really this, but the dangest thing is the people actually see me as that.”

It gives me a chance to actually see the person and see how they see themselves. The other one that I love is, tell me about something that happened in your life before the age of 12, that you think has had more of an impact on you today than anything else. And it makes someone stop and think and it shows how vulnerable they want to be or not.

And it doesn't have to be they lost their pet dog or their grandmother died. “I, I got caught stealing a candy bar in, in the 5 and 10.” If they even know what that is. In the drug store, in the CVS. How's that? Um. 


[00:16:13] Adam Grant: 

Wawa here. 


[00:16:13] Danny Meyer: 

Yeah. 


[00:16:14] Adam Grant: 

But.


[00:16:14] Danny Meyer: 

Yeah, Wawa. But the point is, is that whatever that story is, you then get a chance to talk about, how did it change who you are today?


[00:16:23] Adam Grant: 

And you're looking for vulnerability there? 


[00:16:25] Danny Meyer: 

I'm looking for honesty, vulnerability. Uh, willingness to grow, looking maybe for a little growth mindset. It also gives me a chance to show my vulnerability, and I think that I'm, I'm not gonna go there if, if I already know from the get go that this is not someone that we're gonna hire.

But if I start to feel like it is, we start to build trust. And I think that trust is the foundation of what a great boss and subordinate relationship is gonna be ultimately anyway. 


[00:16:58] Adam Grant: 

Well, this is one of the many reasons I've been such a fan of your leadership is, right from the get go you're looking for hidden potential in candidates that other people might miss.

Once you hire somebody, you've also gone way above and beyond to make it clear that you care about them as human beings, that you wanna see them succeed, that you're there to help them grow. Talk about how you do that? What happens in onboarding? What happens when you think about, let's say somebody who's a server who has aspirations to become a restaurant manager, and then maybe even, um, a chef one day? Like, what, what does that process look like? 


[00:17:31] Danny Meyer: 

It's a lot of give and take. It's a pretty good title for a book. Um, as you asked the question, I'm, I was thinking about an exchange I had just last night with a prospective employee. It actually led to one of my other favorite questions. My wife does not like this question.

She always thinks I'm bringing business speaking to our marriage. I said, no, I really care if that's why I'm asking this question. But this is, uh, somebody who we actually do hope to hire and there was a kind of a glitch where this person was getting advice from someone that maybe they couldn't sign up quite as quickly a as possible, and it didn't make sense to me, but I said, “I'm sure there's gotta be a really good reason that, that you're getting that advice from somebody. And I just want you to help me understand what it is.” 

And I said, “I may or may not agree with it, but if you can help me understand, that would be really helpful.” That's the question that sometimes doesn't work as well in my marriage. “Help me understand why you're so angry with me right now?” Um.


[00:18:36] Adam Grant: 

And and what's the reaction? You're beyond help?


[00:18:39] Danny Meyer: 

Yeah. The, the other one that doesn't work so well in my marriage, but it really works in work is, “It it'd be really nice if you had a charitable assumption about my motivations.”


[00:18:51] Adam Grant: 

I've crashed and burned on that one many times.


[00:18:54] Danny Meyer: 

I said, “I'm gonna express why I don't think you have a problem. Why I think you can actually sign up immediately, but go take that to the person giving your advice. And here's the cool thing, when you come back, I'm, I'm gonna accept whatever you come back with. I'm gonna trust that and it, it's gonna work out.” 

And the person wrote me a note last night saying, “It's all good. I'm signing up.” But here's the cool thing. He then said, “Thank you for trusting me to go find out on my own.”

And so it gave me a chance to start our relationship right now, it wasn't a make or break thing if the person doesn't sign up till next week, but there were people on our team saying, “That person better sign up right now or we're not gonna be able to hire him.” I said, “That's not how it works.” I just think that when you lead with trust, you get trust.


[00:19:45] Adam Grant: 

I think we first connected around the idea that we both want to hire and promote people who are givers, not takers. And for me what that meant in your world is you've gotta be customer focused. And you said, “Uh-uh.” Tell me more. 


[00:19:59] Danny Meyer: 

You gotta be customer focused. But the input to that as being employee focused, we came up with a recipe that we want 100% employees.

And 49% is gonna be their technical skills. 51% is gonna be their hospitality skills. And then furthermore, what we, what we then did was to tell everyone on the team, your job when you come to work is first and foremost to take great care of each other, to set an example of excellence with the 49%, and set an example of hospitality with 51% and you will be held accountable.

Even before how you treat our customers, our paying customers for how you treat each other. And the reason is that I firmly believe in vicious cycles and virtuous cycles. I, I believe that one bad thing can keep leading to something even worse, and I believe that one good thing can keep leading to something even better.

So we then held everyone on our team accountable for what we call the virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality. And their job is to put their customer second, put their colleagues first, put the community in which we do business third, put our suppliers fourth and put our investors fifth. And I had to be crystal clear 'cause I wasn't, for the first couple of years, people thought this was a totem pole where, “Oh, all I did what I was supposed to do. I took care of each other.” 

And we didn't make any money 'cause the investors are at the bottom of the totem pole. And I realized I had not done an effective job of making it clear. This is not a totem pole, it is a prioritization of our stakeholders, but it's a virtuous cycle. If you break it anywhere, you break the whole thing.

And the reason that we put investors fifth is not because we wanna make less money, it's 'cause we wanna make more money. 'Cause if one good thing keeps leading something even better. That has to be the output, but the input has to be our people. And by the way, why do I know this works? What's the best way to make happy employees?

They get raises and they get promotions. Does that happen when you're not making money? Uh-uh. So it, it is truly a virtuous cycle and when you break it anywhere, you do break the whole thing. 


[00:22:15] Adam Grant: 

There are organizational psychologists like Ben Schneider who would be just thrilled to see this having for years studied the way that how you treat your employees spills over then to affect the customer experience.

And it's still remarkable though how many leaders fail to understand this. I look at Jeff Bezos for example, just in the last few years, finally saying, “We were wrong when our mission was to be customer focused and that we wanted to be Earth's most customer centric company. We should have said, we also wanna be Earth's best employer.”


[00:22:46] Danny Meyer: 

It doesn't cost any more money to do this. As a matter of fact, it makes it so much more gratifying to be at work. It really does. First of all, I do need to to mention that 90% of our employees don't really have a choice. They cannot work remotely. You can't do dishes on Zoom or decant, a bottle of decant, a bottle of wine for a guest on Zoom or something like that.

But the people in our home office, and there's probably 120 at Union Square Hospitality Group, do have a choice. I started doing something myself, which is that every Tuesday, I would come into the office and I would just have an open hour at my desk with my door wide open, Crawlers and Coffee is what it was called, and you could come in and talk about anything you wanted to talk about.

And it was a great opportunity not only to give people a reason to want to come to work, but they wanted to be heard, gave me a chance to hear all kinds of stuff going on. Never an agenda. Sometimes we didn't even talk about business, but you started to see that it became cool to, to want to come to work.

We still don't have a rule, but teams, turns out like to work with teams. Turns out that for the same reason that we don't want all of our meals delivered by DoorDash, we actually like going to restaurants still, it's 'cause people like being with people and they get sick of being pan off in their their own apartment by themselves.


[00:24:19] Adam Grant: 

So I think it's time for lightning round and also some additional audience questions. Are you ready? Okay. First question, what is your go-to Shake Shack order?


[00:24:30] Danny Meyer: 

Double cheeseburger with a slice of raw onion and a pickle. And I don't like raw onions, but when you get a double, the, the slice melts and so it's cooked.

That's really good. And I get a mini vanilla milkshake to go with it. 'Cause you dip the fries in a vanilla milkshake, other worldly. 


[00:24:53] Adam Grant: 

What's the menu item you've been dreaming about but never introduced at any restaurant? 


[00:24:59] Danny Meyer: 

At any restaurant. I've tried so hard to have a barbecued bologna sandwich. Topped with coleslaw and barbecue sauce. Mmhmm.


[00:25:13] Adam Grant: 

I'm so glad that hasn't happened. 


[00:25:14] Danny Meyer: 

Well, no, but think about it. Think about it for a minute. Bologna is basically a round hotdog. It fits on a hamburger bun way better than a hotdog does. It's perfect. Why do people love hot dogs, but they don't want this? 


[00:25:29] Adam Grant: 

What's your favorite conversation to have with an employee who wants to grow?


[00:25:35] Danny Meyer: 

Help me understand what your aspirations are and what we can do to get out of your way so you can achieve them? 


[00:25:41] Adam Grant: 

Get out of your way as opposed to support. That's fascinating. 


[00:25:45] Danny Meyer: 

It's kind of like being a parent. I think we do a much better job of screwing up our kids than helping them be successful. I, I hope my kids don't hear that quote.

Um, if you, if you did a great job of hiring and that's really where we put our focus, we really focused hard on, on the hiring, then it is our job to, if you hire great people, get out of their way and let them succeed. Yes. Give 'em the tools. But don't do stupid things that make it harder to succeed. We ha we create so much friction with meetings that didn't have to happen, not providing tools, that there should be not fixing things that should have been fixed.


[00:26:23] Adam Grant: 

That tracks with all the work in psychology on how bad is stronger than good or what our own Paul Rozin is called, Negativity Bias. And it does turn out that getting rid of things people dislike is probably a bigger positive than adding things that they love. Last time you were here, you gave some fantastic advice for people who are afraid of taking risks, and it was an alternative to the question, what could go wrong? Enlighten us, please. 


[00:26:45] Danny Meyer: 

I, I'm a idea minute kind of guy. Some of 'em are bad, like the barbecue bologna, but, but I don't like when someone comes to a meeting telling you what, what's wrong with it? So I've really grown very, very fond of asking the question, what could possibly go right? What could possibly go right?

What if this thing works? And I've learned that in my own business, it helps me to dream bigger dreams when I ask that question. But it also helps us plan for success because a lot of our failures are when we got so caught up in the what could go wrong stuff that we failed to see, guys, what if this thing actually works, will we be prepared for success?


[00:27:29] Adam Grant: 

Frontline worker retention has been a huge challenge. What have you done since COVID started to help with that?


[00:27:37] Danny Meyer: 

Single biggest thing we did, and this was an idea that a lot of people on my team shot down. It's gonna put us outta business. It's never gonna work. And I stuck to my guns on it. But to reinforce how powerful the 51% hospitality skills are, we started giving everyone on our team a 51% discount to dine at any of our places anytime.

And I will tell you that it has been the most potent retention tool ever. And a lot of people who work in our industry cannot necessarily afford to eat a lot of the kind of restaurants and our guests are bringing in all these expectations, but our own staff hasn't had the experience themselves. So by giving this 51% discount, it allows our staff members to actually understand the experience they're providing.

How does it feel to be on the receiving end? But here's the even best part of it, is that they end up telling us what we need to do to get better, which is so much better than me telling them what they need to do to get better. 


[00:28:39] Adam Grant: 

So you're saying to everyone in this room who has a retention challenge, it's just two steps to solve it.

Number one, start a food business. And then number two, discount for employees. Okay. Check. 


[00:28:53] Danny Meyer: 

I would think 51% off anyone's business would be a help helpful thing. 


[00:28:57] Adam Grant: 

Only, only if your employees like your products or services. You mentioned earlier, treating each other well is a, a key expectation. How do you measure that?


[00:29:07] Danny Meyer: 

Trust surveys. We do pulse surveys, you know, we have guest sentiment, we have employee sentiment, and we know on a pretty ongoing basis how we're doing in both. And at the end of the day, I kind of feel like there's three things if they're all headed in the right direction. I'm sleeping really well at night.

Does it feel better to work here today than it did last time we asked? Does it feel better to dine here today? And are we making more money? 


[00:29:35] Adam Grant: 

How do you navigate subcultures across different locations? You wanna allow for variation, obviously. 


[00:29:40] Danny Meyer: 

Yeah. 


[00:29:40] Adam Grant: 

But you want some consistency too. How do you walk that tight rope?


[00:29:43] Danny Meyer: 

We champion it, so as long as the really core things like what I call enlightened hospitality and excelling at the expected behaviors. And I do believe that the businesses that out behave the competition are the ones that prevail. We have a lot of different restaurants and I love the fact that that each one has its own.

We call House Pride and we actually create opportunities for them to compete with each other. Sometimes on the playing field at staff picnics, we do, um, annually an award ceremony where we reinforce the behaviors that we want, but all the restaurants kind of sit with themselves and they're rooting for their own team, and it's pretty cool watching that.


[00:30:31] Adam Grant: 

There's obviously a behavioral scientist in the room who wants to know, do you run experiments between your different locations? 


[00:30:37] Danny Meyer: 

No. Sorry.


[00:30:40] Adam Grant: 

Next year. Okay. Uh. 


[00:30:42] Danny Meyer: 

Uh, I'd like to know what kind I might run. One other thing we did once, which was great, after a particularly tough winter, and this was a few years ago, the economy wasn't doing great.

I had a cold one day and I went to one of our restaurants and I said, “I just need a really good bowl of chicken soup.” And that chef made me an amazing bowl. It was the chef of Tabla. It was great. Chili peppers, ginger, all the stuff made me feel better. And I said, “You know what? What this town could use right now is a good bowl of chicken soup.”

And I challenged every one of our chefs to do an experiment. So maybe I did do this, where each chef could put his or her thumbprint on chicken soup. They all came up with their own recipe and we promoted this thing. We gave all the recipes out and we said to our guests, “For every bowl of chicken soup we sell for this month, we're gonna give $3 to City Harvest to fight hunger. You get to feel better. We get to promote what is different about each one of our restaurants.” 

That was a pretty cool thing. 


[00:31:44] Adam Grant: 

Well, Danny, you talk a lot about enlightened hospitality. I have to say what I admire you most for is enlightened leadership. And I know you would be the first to say, “I don't wanna be cloned.” But I think the world could use a few more Danny Meyers. And I think, you know, it’s just.


[00:31:59] Danny Meyer: 

He lost all of his credibility with that last statement right there. 


[00:32:02] Adam Grant: 

Completely disagree. 


[00:32:03] Danny Meyer: 

There's a great expression in in Italian, basta cosi, enough already. 


[00:32:09] Adam Grant: 

Well, if I, if I can. 


[00:32:10] Danny Meyer: 

Thank you. 


[00:32:10] Adam Grant: 

If I can just embarrass you for a second. I will say in the, in all the time we've known each other, I've never seen you say no to any request ever.

And although I worry about your wellbeing, I greatly appreciate the, the way that you're willing to serve and, and share your wisdom. And I know we've all benefited from that today. So thank you.

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.


[00:33:11] Danny Meyer: 

Like we all know his IQ can dance circles around mine doesn't make him a better person than me. I don't know how he got it.


[00:33:17] Adam Grant: 

There are other things that make me a better person than you. 


[00:33:21] Danny Meyer: 

Um. 


[00:33:22] Adam Grant: 

I'm just kidding. I'm trying to do humble swagger.  


[00:33:25] Danny Meyer: 

Work on the humble part. Um.


[00:33:32] Adam Grant: 

I'm sure I could have been a contender.