Jeffrey Summers

Two Roads. One Choice. Which operator are you?

There are two kinds of rigidity in a restaurant operation. One keeps you alive. One kills you slowly while you convince yourself it's commitment. The operator who holds the line on Guest experience standards when the cast is tired, when...

When You Let AI Speak For You, You’ve Already Left The Stage

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook

AI doesn't eliminate judgment. It relocates it. That's the shift most operators miss. When you use AI to write your job posting, respond to a negative review, describe your menu, or draft your marketing copy, you're not saving time. You're...

The Cheapest Consultant You’ll Ever Have

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook

An unhappy Guest is the most honest feedback the marketplace will ever hand you. It costs nothing to receive and most operators waste it anyway. Not because they don't care. Because they're managing their own discomfort instead of the Guest's...

When Everyone Asks the Same Question

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook

A paper published earlier this year compared more than 350 AI models and looked at the questions they get wrong. When models fail, they tend to fail together, agreeing on the same wrong answer about 60% of the time. Random...

The Five-Minute Speech You Have Never Given

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Perspective

Jack Welch spent twenty years giving the same five-minute speech. The specifics changed as GE changed, but the structure never did: Here is why the current situation cannot continue. Here is where we are going. Here is how we are...

Why Your Leadership Training Is Not Working

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, People

Plato argued he needed fifty years to develop a good leader. Most restaurant operations give it three days — a seminar, a workshop, maybe an online course — and then wonder why nothing changed. The research is consistent: most leadership...

Eight Of Your Ten Cast Members Are Not Giving You Their Best

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, People, Perspective

Twenty percent. That is the share of employees who report giving their very best to their jobs when surveyed across industries and organizations. And that number gets lower, not higher, the longer people have been at the company. Read that...

The Values On Your Wall Are Not Your Values

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, People, Perspective

There is almost no correlation between the words a company posts about its values and the behavior of the people who work there. This finding comes from decades of organizational research — and it holds whether the organization is a...

Your Current Business Design Will Eventually Fail — That Is Not A Prediction, It Is A Guarantee

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, Perspective, Profit

Three Harvard Business School professors wrote something in 1996 that most operators have never heard and need to read twice: "Outward value migration is inevitable. That is why we can guarantee that your current business design will eventually fail." Not...

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