Tag Archives: Food

April 18, 2014 · 8:13 am

Thought And Preparation

This is the time of year when many families host some sort of holiday gathering.

Grupp från Bonniers bokförlag vid middagsbord ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It might be a Passover seder or it could be an Easter Sunday gathering.  Our Foodie Friday Fun this week was spurred by that sort of activity.  I’m sure you’ve been to gatherings of this sort where the host had it all together.  The food came to the table all at the same time and at the appropriate serving temperature.  There were no shrieks of “we forgot the rolls” midway through the meal (you rarely hear that at a seder, by the way).  The snacks and drinks are out when guests arrive and the entire experience is executed with efficiency.

I’ve been to meals of a very different sort.  The food comes out one dish at a time and sits on the table until everything is ready, getting cold in the process.  The menu is not quite complete, usually because it wasn’t thought through carefully.  That’s really the point this week – the need for thought and preparation in the kitchen.  Turns out it’s critical in business too.

The two things need to go together for the cook – or businessperson – to be successful.  The hosts who don’t have it all together did think about what to serve.  There was thought.  The problem is that they didn’t translate that thought into preparation.  They didn’t have a real plan.  The opposite is also true.  You can prepare all you want – make various dishes – but without careful thought beforehand, the odds are that you’ll have a meal that just doesn’t work since no one wants all proteins or to have to make a last minute run to the store for the ingredients you didn’t write on your shopping list.

It’s the same in business.  Not taking the time to think a project or situation through before organizing those thoughts into the various types of preparation the enterprise needs to do is futile.  That preparation will have to be redone when something that wasn’t thought through comes to light.  It’s nice when someone volunteers to “dive in” to a project but it’s even better when they make that dive after thinking through the depth of the pool.

I hope if you end up at a gathering of family or friends this weekend you’ll take a step back and appreciate the thought and preparation that went into the day.  If it’s been done well you probably wouldn’t notice it otherwise.  It’s when there isn’t thought and preparation – done together – that you do notice because things go horribly wrong.  Make sense?

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April 11, 2014 · 10:46 am

Sinkers Vs. Floaters

It’s Foodie Friday and this is the last food-related post before the start of Passover.

matzah ball soup

Photo credit: h-bomb)

In honor of that, I thought I’d raise one of the most important questions this time of year brings:  sinkers or floaters?   I’m talking about matzo balls, of course, and the question of whether they should float in the soup like little clouds or sink to the bottom like rocks is a matter of serious debate around the Seder table.  As it turns out, the debate contains some instructive business thinking as well.

I’ll preface what I am about to say with an acknowledgment that I am not a neutral party.  I have some definite thoughts about matzo balls.  I should also add that here in the New York area, many non-Jews eat a lot of matzo ball soup year round so the debate isn’t limited to Passover tables.

The basic recipe for matzo balls is simple.  Matzoh meal, eggs, fat of some sort, and liquid.  That’s where agreement stops.  The primary aspects of the discussion involve the following (almost Talmudic) questions:

  • Should the kneidlach (Yiddish for matzo balls) sink or float in the soup?
  • Should they contain schmaltz (chicken fat) or margarine or oil?
  • Should seltzer be used to “leaven” them?
  • Should the egg whites be separated and whipped to add lightness?
  • Should they be boiled in salted water or in the soup broth?
  • Should they be the size of golf balls or tennis balls?

There are some minor issues including the use of parsley and other seasoning but the above are the main elements.  Every family has their own answers and even within a family there is disagreement, especially if there are two grandmothers involved.  Which brings us to the business point.

There are few things more simple and yet as complex as these little dumplings.  The risk one runs when just assuming they can make them without careful thought to each of the above is that the debate rears its ugly head at the table and a familial brouhaha ensues.  The same problem happens in business.  We often look at seemingly simple issues without a fully thinking through the many complex underlying issues that can affect how well the final product fares.  That can be a huge mistake and it’s always worth a few minutes thinking through those issues before jumping into a problem.

Floaters with a nice “chew”, by the way.  Yours?

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April 4, 2014 · 8:32 am

Cooking In A Closet

For those of you who live outside of New York City today’s Foodie Friday topic may be a little esoteric.

Tiny kitchen

(Photo credit: doraemon)

Then again, since I’ve never lived in an apartment in any other city, perhaps many of you can identify with it.  I know the subject was one I lived with in our NYC apartment and even when we moved to the suburbs the issue persisted:

The challenges of a small kitchen.

Our apartment’s kitchen was literally a closet.  A large walk-in had been changed into a kitchen.  There was a small stove with a tiny oven, a narrow refrigerator, some shelves and about two square feet of counter space.  A small  cutting board and a bowl would cover it completely.  My culinary ambitions generally overwhelmed my kitchen’s ability to produce what I was visualizing.  You’d cook sequentially instead of concurrently, making one course and removing it to another room while you started the next.  Two pots were tight on the stove even though it had four burners, and good luck if you need to sear something over high heat in a pan while simmering a pot somewhere else on the stove.

What cooking in a small kitchen taught me were a series of skills that I still use.  First, I had to think through the entire meal – what to cook when and how to have everything hit the table at the same time.  Second, I learned to be organized.  There wasn’t room to have clutter nor the luxury of extraneous kitchen equipment or ingredients. In short, I learned to focus on the essence of what I was doing and to do so in an incredibly efficient manner.  Which is, of course, the business point.

It’s not just start-up businesses that have resource challenges.  When I work with my clients who are early and mid stage companies, I think about cooking in a closet and how those skills are critical.  That said, every business can stand to think that way.  Sure, your ambitions are way bigger than your business, but what’s the essence of what you’re doing?  What’s really necessary in terms of tools?  How do I organize everything to maximize efficiency?  Since the business can’t do everything it wants to all at once, what’s needed to be done in what sequence to get us where we want to go?

I don’t cook in a small kitchen any more and I have way more silly tools than I know I need.  But while you can take the cook out of the small kitchen, the small kitchen stays in the cook.  I think it’s the same with small business people.  You agree?

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