“Restaurants close easily. Especially when the owner isn’t committed 110%” said Gordon Ramsay on a recent episode of BBC’s reality show “Kitchen Nightmares“. My buddy Geoff who is a CIO in the area mentioned this show when we had lunch this week. He told me that this show was a great management training class for IT managers. I was familiar with Gordon Ramsay and his liberal dropping of F-Bombs on other shows but I never really took him seriously as a businessman. After watching two episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, I have changed my opinion of him. He definitely understands how to run a business, which in this case, happens to be restaurants.
For those not familiar with the show, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay selects a restaurant owner that is about to go out of business and helps them analyze what is causing the failure and helps turn their restaurant around. At least he tries to turn them around. Ultimately, his show is an examination of the leader who runs the business and their failings as a manager. In both episodes I watched this week, the owners had individuals in the kitchen that were disruptive and not taking their jobs seriously. That’s a problem in a restaurant or in an IT department. In both episodes, the manager-employee relationship was skewed. Managers either hired friends or weren’t sure how to manage their staff. Employees didn’t respect their boss and this manifested by tardiness and lack of attention to their job duties. The real losers were the customers.
In the first episode (Ruby Tates), the owner of the business learned from Ramsay how to manage his employees and turned his restaurant around. Sadly, in the second episode (Piccolo Teatro), the other owner didn’t address their own inability to manage the restaurant and the restaurant went out of business. Kitchen Nightmares will not make you cancel your subscription to Harvard Business Review, but it is still a good management tool for watching the effects poor leadership has on a organization. And it’s a lot more entertaining than reading those HBR case studies!
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