Sunday, August 28, 2005

New recipe & why a restaurant is a top B-school

20050827_recette_tartedelegumes_002Continuing to publish Open Recipes, I give you the delicious, yet healthy, vegetables pie, which was invented during the weekend. The recipe is only in French and I might translate it one of these days.
Download CusineLibre_RecetteLibreTarteAuxLegumes.pdf



You know, a restaurant is a good metaphor for almost any business regardless how hi-tech the business can be. And I spent a few summers working in restaurants back in the eighties. There is marketing (place, style, menu), sales (the helpful guy or girl who comes to get your order), operations (the kitchen), finance (cashier desk), procurement (where we get the ingredients & drinks)... and so on. It is actually one the best places to learn about the eternal truths of general management, people management, customer care, CRM, knowledge management, planning... and a few other very practical things.
As ever, good instructions on how to make what the customer is asking for are important... only insofar as they are actually applied. So it's more about the skill than about the plan. More about the action than about the talk. As Gandhi said, "an ounce of practice is worth more than a ton of theory".  Which is also one of the eternal truths of Life in general. And that's valid for every single being, from the leader of the most advanced nation as he keeps babbling (but not doing much) about freedom and democracy, to the tinniest creature as it tries out ways to evolve in a Darwinian world of co-opetition as Hamel, Prahalad, Brandenburger and a few other researchers-practitioners would put it.



So go on and try this recipe. Take pleasure executing every single step of it. Have fun doing it. Make each action a celebration of how perfect our universe can be (it just depends on attitude). Eventually you will end up having something quite enjoyable in your plate. Bon appétit!
 



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