Category Archives: food

October 25, 2019 · 3:51 pm

Harder Than It Is

Happy Foodie Friday! I was menu-planning the other day (an absolute must before the weekly trip to the grocery store) and I came across a dish that I know to be pretty easy to make yet which appears way more difficult. I’ve served it before and people are always all “oh, that must have taken hours” about it when it’s really about a 15-minute prep. As an aside, there are many other dishes I know – really good Bolognese sauce, for example – that take way more time than you’d think even using a pressure cooker to speed things up.

Seeing that dish got me to thinking, in a roundabout way, that we humans have a tendency to think things are way more difficult than they are in many cases. In fact, I think some of us go to great lengths to make it that way. I’m not talking about a particular type of person I’d run across in business every so often. You know the one – they create problems so that they can solve them and be the hero. No, what I’m talking about is that we love to make things harder than they actually are.

Think about it. What things did you do today that purposefully made your life more difficult ? It was probably so small a thing, or something so ingrained in you, that you didn’t even notice that you did it. Maybe you didn’t set your alarm to allow for enough time to be someplace. Maybe you sat on a task until right before a deadline and you couldn’t get it done on time because something unforeseen happened.  Or maybe you just enjoy the drama. It’s sort of the same thrill as riding a roller-coaster, right? You put yourself in danger and when you survive, you feel a thrill.

Here’s my take. Life can be like some seemingly-fancy dishes – much easier to pull together than meets the eye IF – and it’s a big if – you have the skills required, leave adequate time to complete the task, and don’t make it harder than it has to be. All of us make our lives both in and out of business harder than they have to be at times and unless and until we recognize the times that we’re doing it, nothing much will change.

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 18, 2019 · 2:45 pm

The Sides

This Foodie Friday, I want to discuss what is a sometimes-overlooked ingredient in a successful meal – the sides. I’ve got a friend who shows up for dinner every so often and the question is never “what are you making?” but “what are the sides?” That got me to thinking.

You probably haven’t given much thought to the role that side dishes play. First of all, they can help balance out the nutrition of your meal. I’ll plead guilty to being very “main” focused (you can read that as “protein”). Making a smart choice about serving a seasonal veggie or a salad or a roasted root puree of some sort can support the main dish in a way that actually improves it. Think mashed potatoes and meatloaf, for example. Many really good sides require very little work and can be prepped and assembled while the main is cooking.

There is actually research that bears out the importance of side dishes to restaurant diners. A research company published a report in 2013 called…

The Starters, Small Plates & Sides Consumer Trend Report, which details the importance of side dishes in the consumer’s choice of entree. 36% of consumers stated they selected an entree based upon the accompanying sides, and 46% stated they were less likely to order an entree if it came with an accompanying side they disliked. In addition, about 45% of consumers prefer familiar sides over unfamiliar sides. Sides can make or break an entree.

So there you go. Of course, the same is very true in business. Every team has its “mains” but every team also needs its sides. I have rarely found any star manager in business who also didn’t surround him- or herself with a phenomenal bunch of people that might not have been stars themselves but served to make the entire team better. These folks – analysts, accountants, and others – are the ones who usually aren’t front and center but who make the business successful, just as the sides make the main shine and the meal a success.

Our job as managers, much like that of a skilled chef, is to figure out the accompanying sides. I’ve sat with many clients who point out after some business development star has come to pitch them that the “star” isn’t going to work on their business day to day. It will be the “sides”. The smart clients always asked about that, often wanting to meet the people who would be on the account day to day. I know I usually asked about that as well when I got pitched by an outside firm. If the sides weren’t very good, I’d usually pass on the rest of the “meal.”

Don’t ignore your team’s sides. You’re only as good as they are!

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 11, 2019 · 4:43 pm

The Dead Of Dining

I came up with today’s Foodie Friday topic this past week as I was dining out. Which of course leads to The Grateful Dead. If any of you are Deadheads, one thing you know is that when the band was on and in full flight they were magnificent. They could take you with them as they soared musically. Unfortunately, the odds of that happening on any given night were not close to 100%.

It’s the thing that frustrates most of us who listened to The Dead. You could go to a show never knowing if you were going to walk away uplifted or disappointed. The experience was inconsistent. They were the musical personification of the old Mother Goose nursery rhyme:

There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
When she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.

OK, back to food. I took a little mini-vacation this week to an island just off the North Carolina coast. It was lovely but because it is a relatively small island, there are limited dining options. One of these options was a place that serves Mexican food. The first time I dined there I had a lovely skirt steak but what struck me was how good the accompanying rice and black beans were. The beans were perfectly textured with a little smokiness coming from a piece of smoked pork tossed in the pot. The rice was billowy. I made it a point to return on another night.

The second night I dined there, the beans were bland and tough, as was the rice. In fact, the rice had a crunch to it, not like the lovely socarrat that forms in paella but from being undercooked and raw. Everything from the drinks to the entrees seems to have been tossed together with a minimum of care and thought.

It reminded me that one thing we need in business is consistency. Whether we’re serving food or figures, customers need to know that they can count on our product meeting a high standard each and every time. Employees and our team need to know that everyone is treated fairly and using the same standards. Unlike The Dead or this restaurant, we can’t miss the mark as often as we hit it. The only times we miss the standards we set should be those occasions when we move those standards up a notch. Make sense?

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Helpful Hints, Music

Tagged as , , , , , ,