Hello chefs, This is Chefs PSA Podcast.
I'm your host Andre and Terra. On today's episode, we're going
to talk about universal laws through a chef's lens.
Stay tuned. Now before we get started,
here's a brief update. I just completed my new book Bad
Cooks Everywhere. It's going to be out June 8th on
paperback. So if you want it, which I know
you want it, go get it. It's good.
It's fiction. For those of you that are
unaware you haven't been following along, it's a
fictional narrative about a culinary school student going
into kitchens and what that is like.
I mean, it's not a true story, but it's your true story.
It's every chef's true story. All the characters in there are
going to remind you of someone, maybe you, maybe your boss,
maybe your friend. Anyway, you get the point.
You want to go get it? Bad Cooks Everywhere out June
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For those of you that are following along, this is the new
format. We're going to go one solo
episode, one guest centric episode.
So this is my solo episode with you.
And today's episode is about universal laws.
So what are universal laws? Universal laws are typically
laws that are inherently true. They're not always true.
There's always an exception to the rule and these universal
laws are acceptable across multiple situations.
In this case, we're taking some of the most common universal
laws. Maybe you'll learn something.
And how do they apply to a culinary or leadership setting
in the kitchen? You could think of this podcast
as a companion episode to another podcast that I did
earlier called The Mental Blocks, The Mental Blocks, which
is Chef's PFA episode 26. So think of this as a companion
to that. You should go back and listen to
that one if you enjoy this one. We're going to take some of
these universal laws and we're going to apply them to what
you're doing and we're going to learn.
We're going to learn how to think strategically.
This is the advantage that you get from listening to chef's PSA
is that I'm always thinking how you can be the exception to the
rule. And one of the biggest things
that I noticed in a lot of successful chefs, as well as
myself and my career, is that the chefs that think differently
are usually the ones that are the most successful.
When you think like everyone else, you end up like everyone
else. And what are those little things
that give a slight advantage to other chefs?
It's usually in how they think and how they approach
situations. And I'm not just talking about
food. Sometimes I'm talking about
management, leadership, marketing, all the things that
go into being a chef. They all play a part in making
sure that you're successful. So today, let's start with the
very first law that we're going to explain, Murphy's Law.
Everyone knows Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong will
go wrong. How does that apply to the
kitchen? Well, as a chef, you have to
constantly be thinking about what can go wrong in every
potential situation. If you're doing a catering, did
you count all the plates? Did you count all the gloves?
Did you count all the proteins? Did you schedule enough people?
Did you anticipate that this person may call off?
You always have to have a backup plan.
I was talking to a friend the other day and I told him to make
sure that he had his bases covered for a certain situation
and he said I'm pretty sure that situation won't happen.
I said we'll cover your bases anyway because you don't want to
be in a situation where it does happen.
And then you think, oh, I should have spent 5 minutes planning,
right? That's something that a lot of
chefs do is we think everything's going to go well.
So we don't think about all the things that could potentially go
wrong. When I was a chef, I used to sit
all my chefs in the room with me and I'll think about every
possible scenario from every potential angle.
I would go through everything in my mind and I would think of
what could go wrong in this situation, What where are my
blind spots? And as my other chefs would come
into the office, we'd sit around and say, did you think of this?
Did you think of that? What if this, what if that?
And it's like looking at the chess board.
You want to make sure that you think of all the potential moves
and what could be the potential outcome of those moves.
Sometimes the move looks good and then you do it and the
outcome is bad. So thinking about every possible
outcome with Murphy's Law in this case, you want to make sure
that you have a mitigation plan for whatever could potentially
happen. The next one is Parkinson's Law.
Work expands to fill the time available for completion.
What does that mean? It means that however long you
give someone to do something is how long it's going to take them
to do it. Putting timelines on things will
help you become more efficient. So I'm going to give you an
example. If you write a prep list that
has 20 items on it and someone has 8 hours to do that prep
list, they'll get it done. If you write a prep list with
half of the amount and they have 8 hours to do it, they'll still
get it done in eight hours. It's a really amazing thing.
For those of you that use lists and to do lists, it's amazing
when you write everything on your To Do List how you could
accomplish it. Whether that's one thing or 20
things, it always manages to get done.
If you go back and you listen to the last episode I did with
Aaron Bluedorn, we were talking about how when he was on the
chef's table, how he only had an hour to get the food up, and it
was a lot of food to prepare in one hour.
And I asked him the question. I said, you know, were you ever
surprised at how much you were able to do in one hour?
And he says, yeah, it blew my mind, which was reinforcing the
idea of how people underestimate how much work they could do in
an allotted time frame that they're working with.
That's Parkinson's Law, time management skills, putting
deadlines on things. When I was a chef, I used to
write prep lists for people that were just a little bit more than
I knew they could handle, and they always got it done.
If you want to improve your speed in your kitchen, write
longer prep lists. If you're a cook and you want to
improve your own speed, give yourself a longer prep list and
see how much more you could accomplish because for some
reason it always gets done. The next universal law that
we're going to talk about is the Pareto principle, otherwise
known as the 8020 rule. And what that means is usually
80% of the outcomes are affected by 20% of the input or 20% of
the 'cause you think about that as a, as a chef, about 80% of
the work gets done by 20% of the employees or 80% of the revenue
comes from about 20% of the menu items.
So a lot of times when I would go in and someone wanted me to
improve the menu, I would focus on the, the workhorses of the
menu and say if we're getting bad scores, you know, from Yelp
or OpenTable or comments, you don't need to focus on
everything on the menu. Focus on the items that are
selling because that's what's causing the most amount of
feedback. The 20% is usually affecting the
80%, so focus on the most important 20% and you'll make
big impact on the other 80%. Your food cost might be driven
by 20% of the items that you're buying, not the other 80%.
Sometimes if you're an executive chef and you're tasked with
lowering food cost and you pull up a spreadsheet with all the
items that you're buying and you start looking at everything, the
bottom items, the salt and how much you're spending on bread
and how much you're spending on this, that and the other, when
if you just look at the top 20% of the items, that's where
you're going to make the biggest amount of impact.
So don't worry about the bottom 80%.
Focus on the top 20%. Pareto Principle 8020 rule The
next one is the Peter Principle. Specifically in a hierarchy
situation, employees tend to rise to the level of
incompetence. And what that means is that
people usually get promoted to the point where they become
incompetent, then they stop getting promoted.
So sometimes you get stuck in a position and you don't move
further up, and it's usually because you've been promoted
quickly to the point where you may have skipped over some
things. There may have been some
learning opportunities that you missed.
And then you reach that position and then you're stagnant for
many years until a new injection of growth and learning comes in.
And this is a dangerous situation for a lot of chefs
because I noticed a lot of times we're really eager to get to the
position and to the title. So maybe you want to get to the
executive chef or the sous chef position.
And so you take the job that's going to give you the title, but
you don't grow as much there. And so you remain stagnant or
you get promoted too quick and you weren't fully prepared to go
into that job. So you're stagnant while you're
learning the job, while you're in it, and you may be stuck
there for quite some time. And a lot of times people that
may be promoted beyond their capabilities, it leads to
inefficiencies in the kitchen, into the operation.
They start causing more problems because they don't fully know
what they're doing. They haven't fully grown in the
position. So how do you correct that?
One is to make sure that you're very honest with yourself, that
you have a solid training plan in place for the people that
you're promoting, to make sure that you're not putting someone
in a position before they're ready, that you have continuing
education opportunities for people to learn.
If it's self driven learning, make sure that you as the chef
are using all the resources available to you.
Social media, YouTube, so on and so forth.
This podcast, other podcast that are not as good as this one, but
this one's pretty good. Anyway, we digress.
You get the point. Peter Principle.
The next one is the law of diminishing returns.
Now, Thomas Keller talks about this in his French Laundry
cookbook where he talks about the portion size and that just
making something bigger after several bites, diminishing
returns on the flavor. But there's also diminishing
returns in other aspects of the of the kitchen.
There's diminishing returns when you put too many cooks on the
line, they start bumping into each other.
So let's just say you have a full rail on the board and you
have 3 cooks on the line. 4 would make it better.
Five might make it worse, six will make it even worse.
So there's diminishing returns by adding more people to assist.
They start getting in each other's way.
Diminishing returns by adding more cooks to the situation.
Diminishing returns When you're creating a dish, putting more
doesn't necessarily make it better.
And as chefs, we fall into this category a lot.
You think, oh, it just needs one more thing.
Let's put one more garnish. Let's put one more step and you
keep adding to a specific dish, but you're but the more you add,
you actually subtract from the overall dish.
Less is more sometimes. That's the law of diminishing
returns. It applies in many different
aspects of the kitchen. The next one is Gilbert's law.
Every solution leads to a new problem in a kitchen.
If you're in a leadership position, you start solving
problems constantly. You become a problem solver,
whack a mole management, as they say.
One thing pops up, you knock it down, you go to the next.
But what you start to discover is sometimes when you solve
problems, this is especially true when you take over a new
place, is that you think you see the problem and you've solved
it, only to discover that that problem was created by three
other problems. So you solve those 3 problems
only to find out that there was eight more problems creating the
three. And the further down you go, the
more problems you find. The more you dig, the more you
get. So when you're placed in the
position of leadership, you have to understand that what you see
on the surface is just that. It's just the surface level
problems, they're typically being created by many layers
below that. So I often tell chefs that work
for me, this is when you start digging for problems.
You've got to be prepared for whatever else you're going to
uncover, right? You might start digging and you
might find a graveyard of skeletons.
So be prepared when you start solving problems, there's going
to be more problems that you find when you start solving
them. The next one is Wilson's Law,
and Wilson's Law is basically when you find a solution that
works, someone wants to change it.
This one's so true in kitchens, right?
The system works, everything's running smooth.
New manager comes in, new chef, new sous chef, new GM, whatever
new ownership, they're like, this is not working, let's
change it. I liked it better at my other
place and they throw a monkey wrench in the system and it
causes chaos and it doesn't necessarily work better.
It actually creates more work and more dysfunction.
That old expression, that's not how we did it at my last job,
can sometimes be the catalyst for invoking Wilson's Law.
You quickly want to implement change to the system that's
already working and functioning and then you start to realize
later on that maybe just because it worked at the last place
doesn't mean it works at this place.
I was talking with the chef about this the other day is the
way I cook in one kitchen isn't necessarily the same way I would
cook in another kitchen because your skill level adapts to the
circumstances. You have a kitchen with all the
toys and all the gadgets and everything functioning at a high
functioning team. You could cook at a pretty high
level. You go into another kitchen
where the stove is broken and the walk in doesn't work and you
didn't get a delivery and you're working with entry level cooks
in a very busy restaurant. Your style of food is going to
change. It's not a cookbook answer.
Not everything works universally across kitchens.
I would advise that you have some sort of negotiation process
or some sort of vetting process before you implement change.
My advice to new executive chefs, typically when they take
over a place is you have 30 days, don't change anything.
Write everything down so you don't forget, because after some
time it becomes wallpaper. But if you write down what you
want to change and you don't change it, you can go back and
slowly, strategically start implementing that change.
After 30 days, you usually understand the system.
And then you might go back and look at your list and say, thank
God I didn't change that. Now I understand why that is the
way it is, because a lot of times we're quick to want to
implement change because we think we have a better solution,
but we don't fully understand the problem.
The last one is Falklands law. When it's not necessary to
change, it's necessary to not change.
Constant change can be disruptive.
It makes people want to quit. Usually.
That's why there's high turnover when there's transition and
leadership or there's transition and staff, because the amount of
change that's going on, you're getting new leaders.
Those new leaders are bringing in new systems.
Everyone has new ideas. And this kind of ties into the
last law that we talked about is sometimes you don't need to
change it. You don't need to change it just
for the sake of changing it because for the team around you,
they need to get rhythm and repetition and what they're
currently doing and constantly introducing chaos leads to
things not being consistent, it leads to frustration, it leads
to mistakes. Yes it does lead to growth
because you're learning new things.
But change for the sake of change alone sometimes isn't a
smart decision. You have to be strategic, think
things through before you implement change.
Sometimes stability is good. When I usually take over an
operation, like I said, the 1st 30 days I understand.
I write everything down and then as I start implementing change,
I want to do so rapidly, make sure it sticks to the point
where we get to stability. And then once stability is
established, then I want to minimize the amount of changes
in the kitchen. We have discussions before we
change anything because I'm not saying that I have all the right
ideas. But what I am saying is before
we change the idea, we need to make sure that everyone
understands, everyone's on board, and it's not changed just
for the sake of change. It causes dissension, it causes
confusion, and in the end, it's going to cause more work for
you. But anyway, that's the last one
for today. So I'm hoping that you picked up
some new understanding on some of these universal laws and how
you could apply them to your daily life in the kitchen and
how you could think more strategically and what you're
doing. Think about the chess board.
What's the best possible move in the current situation?
Sometimes the best possible move might not be a great move, and
sometimes the best possible move is to do nothing.
Lao Tzu has a quote. Do nothing and leave nothing
undone. Anyway, go read the Dao De Jane
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We'll be back next week with a guest hit, The Porno Music.