Jeffrey Summers

Two Roads. One Choice. Which operator are you?

You Are Managing Your Restaurant With Tunnel Vision

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

In the late 1990s, John Seely Brown — chief scientist at Xerox PARC — was trying to explain why most computer interfaces exhausted their users. His illustration was simple and brutal. Take two empty toilet paper tubes. Tape them to...

Change Without Transition Is Just Disruption

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

When you change something in your operation — the menu, the service sequence, the room layout, the hours, the price — you are not just changing a process. You are changing a relationship. The Guest who has been coming to...

Why Your Last Change Initiative Did Not Stick

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, People, Performance

The evidence on organizational change is consistent across decades and industries: most change initiatives fail. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the execution was incompetent. Because the people who were supposed to implement the change were never convinced...

The Welder Who Didn’t Tell His Supervisor

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, People, Performance

In the early 1990s, Caterpillar was in the middle of one of the most significant organizational transformations in American manufacturing history. The company had nearly gone bankrupt. It had restructured completely — eliminating its entire centralized management system overnight and...

Your Cast Is Not The Problem. Your System Is.

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

The evidence has been clear for decades: most people problems in organizations are not people problems. They are system problems wearing people's faces. Employees do not generally act against their own organization's interests deliberately. They respond rationally to what they...

Is Your Restaurant A Military Organization — And Do You Even Know It

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

In 2004, researchers at Booz Allen Hamilton surveyed more than 4,000 employees across companies of every size and industry and asked them to describe how their organizations actually worked — not how leadership said they worked, but how decisions got...

Stand In One Spot And Look For Waste Until You Can Actually See It

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

Taiichi Ohno built the Toyota Production System — the operating framework that transformed manufacturing and became the foundation for lean thinking, Six Sigma, and virtually every process improvement methodology that followed. He was also, by all accounts, a brutal teacher....

By The Time The Data Is Clear, The Game Is Already Over

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, Performance, Perspective

Clayton Christensen spent his career studying why great companies fail. The answer was not incompetence. It was that they waited for the data to confirm what the theory had already told them — and by then, it was too late.

The Thinking That Got You Here Is Now The Problem

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, Perspective

There is a concept in complexity science called entrainment of thinking. It describes what happens when ideas and practices that have proven effective in the past become accepted norms — acquiring inertia, becoming invisible, becoming impossible to question not because...

Your Restaurant Operates At The Edge Of Chaos — That Is Not A Problem, It Is The Point

by Jeffrey Summers|From The Playbook, People, Performance

In 1996, a biologist named Stuart Kauffman published a theory about how complex systems — cells, ecosystems, economies — organize themselves. His central finding: the most adaptive, highest-performing systems do not operate in perfect order. They do not operate in...

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