Tag Archives: Business and Economy

April 1, 2016 · 9:40 am

Menu Madness

This Foodie Friday I want to talk about labels. It might sound as if we’re creeping dangerously close to politics in this post but my intent is to maintain a business perspective so please don’t get confused.

I started my business career working for a TV trade group, the Television Bureau of Advertising (TvB). I know that one of the great functions any trade group has is to help the membership with best practices as well as with advocacy. That’s why I’m a little confused about something that took place over the last couple of months. While there aren’t any overt fingerprints from a trade group on it, I’d be shocked if one or more of them wasn’t working behind the scenes.

You can read about this in detail here, but there is a provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires chain restaurants to:

  • Disclose, on menus and menu boards, the number of calories in an item as it is usually prepared and offered for sale;
  • Provide written nutrition information and nutrition claim information to consumers upon request;
  • Provide a “prominent, clear, and conspicuous statement” on menus and menu boards about the availability of the written nutrition information; and
  • Provide, on a sign adjacent to each food item, the number of calories in the item or per serving for self-service items and food on display.

Pretty consumer friendly in my opinion. After all, how can transparency and giving customers information about what they’re considering eating be a bad thing? Nevertheless, Congress passed a law as part of a spending bill to prohibit the FDA from using any funds to implement, administer, or enforce the final rule. Do any of you think your favorite Congress-critter woke up one morning and decided to do this on their own? Probably not. I’d guess one or more restaurant trade groups lobbied for this (and probably made a few donations along the way).

Yes, I get that it makes the restaurant chains involved incur expense. But it’s meant to improve consumer health and not to make the business’ lives easier. It reminds me of the papers pushed by the ANA with respect to ad blocking. Those were more about how to preserve ad opportunities and revenues than about fixing the problem that causes ad blocking in the first place.  Putting profits ahead of people – both those that buy from you and those that work for you – rarely is a good idea, at least in my book.  Yours?

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March 29, 2016 · 11:06 am

Distracted

I read a lot of articles every day.  OK, the truth be told, I skim a lot of articles every day (usually over 1,000).  I read far fewer.  A few things struck  me as I rolled through my RSS reader this morning (I use Feedly).  The first is the repetitive nature of reporting.  Once something is said on one site it seems to show up within a few minutes on another.  The repetition isn’t limited to cross-site activity either.  Many sites will publish the same material again an hour after they first do so.  I’m not sure if they’re A/B testing headlines or what but to me, it’s just clutter and noise.

Another thing that struck me is the sensationalist nature of many of the headlines.  I totally understand the need to stand out in the cluttered media worlds through which my feed orbits, but there is a huge problem with it: distraction.  The headline might be screaming “fire” but as you dig into the article you inevitably find that it discusses the possibly of a fire if several unlikely scenarios occur.  The real issue for many of us is less about the time we waste reading the article than it is the repercussions that ensue from people who don’t.

Think about how often a higher up in your company or a client reads the headline (or worse yet, hears about it from someone else) and pings you for information.  Maybe it’s a chain of emails (each of which takes time to craft) or maybe it’s a phone call or two.  It’s a fire drill that takes time away from the things on which we should be focused.  They’re neither urgent nor important. They’re a distraction.

I don’t love the screaming headlines.  They lead to fire drills which lead to distracted, nervous businesspeople.  It’s a truism that we can’t chase everything nor solve every perceived or potential problem.  I try to scrape off the hype, find the facts, measure them against my current goals, strategies, and tactics.  At that point, I can either toss it (which is usually what happens) or update my thinking.  I don’t get distracted.  You?

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March 25, 2016 · 11:53 am

Your Kitchen

It’s Foodie Friday! It’s no secret that I watch a bunch of cooking shows. In all candor, most of them are wonderful displays of individual talent but really don’t teach us much about the real food world. Nor are they extendable into business thinking, which is what we like to do here on the screed.

Chefs in training in Paris, France (2005).

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The real challenge in a professional restaurant kitchen is coordination and teamwork. Other than Hell’s Kitchen and the annual restaurant wars episode of Top Chef, we rarely get a sense of how difficult that teamwork can be. It does neither the quality of the product nor the business any good to have the meats sitting under a heat lamp while the garnish is being prepared. Obviously, it’s the chef who must oversee the coordination and foster communication, but it’s also the individual cooks.

You probably know that most kitchens have a line and there are various stations in that line. Meats, fish, salads, etc. generally come from different cooks. If one line cook is struggling, the entire process can break down. The cooks need to be organized, making sure to have all the materials they will be needing ready to go. They need to be able to multitask – handling several different items at once. That requires training, practice, and supervision.

Your business isn’t any different. As “the chef” overseeing my “brigade” in the non-food businesses in which I worked, I never felt as if I had to be able to jump on to any station.  By that I mean that no boss needs to be able to handle every job as well as the people doing them each day.  We do, however, need to recognize when there is a problem and ask the right questions to make the problem go away.  Just as a chef can’t make excuses for a slow line cook (train them, move them to a different station, or fire them), no manager can deflect blame for very long.  After all, it’s your kitchen!

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