Remarkable

It’s Friday so you know it’s a Fun Foodie post! I have a bit of a mental exercise for you to try before we delve into the post.  Ready?  Close your eyes (but finish reading this first) and think of a specific meal, and a specific dish within that meal, that you can’t forget.  Go ahead – I’ll wait and then I’ll explain why I’m asking you to play along.Welcome back.  For me, there are a bunch of dishes that come to mind.  One is a plate of Spaghetti vongole veraci I ate in Venice which, much to my daughter’s chagrin, made me literally cry it was so good (my trip to the kitchen to praise the chef in my pidgin Italian is a story for another time).  Another is some jerk chicken cooked on the streets of Brooklyn in an old oil barrel from Boston Jerk City – the best chicken of any sort I’ve ever had.  While dining at the Phoenician in Scottsdale at a business meal I had a quail stuffed with foie gras appetizer that was so good I ordered another one for dessert.

There are a few others although not as many as one might think.  Even though the most recent one of these was almost a year ago, I can still smell and taste each of them as if they were in front of me.  All of these plates of food were memorable because they were remarkable.   In my mind, memorable can be made by the occasion – you got engaged over a meal but can’t remember what you ate, for example.  In the cases above, I’ve had hundreds of plates of clams or pieces of jerk in my life but these stand out – they were remarkable.

You as a businessperson have little control over the occasion but you have complete control over your ability to be remarkable.   It means setting higher standards and executing to reach them on a consistent basis.  Every one of these plates of food did that – from the obvious  care there had been in choosing the ingredients to the careful seasoning to the exacting cooking times – nothing under- or over-cooked, which would negate all the other care.

What are you and your team doing to be remarkable?  Why are you settling for anything less?