The Unlawyer

I was re-reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential last night, and aside from making me hungry, I was struck by this paragraph, at the bottom of page 55 of the hardbound edition of his book:

“What most people don’t get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavors, an textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down for dinner. Line cooking – the real business of preparing the food you eat – is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.”

What is true for restaurants is also true for any business, for profit or not. It is the repetitive, consistent execution by the service team of the many steps that are required to deliver what the customer expects from the transaction, that is one of the key elements of delivering superior – nay, excellent – customer service.

So, how is consistency achieved? Only by the most rigorous training can a business hope to render the service its customers deserve. Not only that: the organization must communicate to its employees what the firm is all about (the vision thing) and what customers expect from it – and them (the mission thing). Without them, everybody on the team will just be muddling through, more likely satisfying customers more by accident than by design. Or, as Bourdan puts it:

“Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.”