e1: Culture Is All You Need
Culture Changes Everything
The title of today’s post is a riff on Attention Is All You Need, the seminal paper that catalyzed popular interest in Large Language Models —the tech that undergirds ChatGPT and its AI kin. Don’t worry, there’s no AI in this post (you’re welcome). The suggestion I’m making is that, in our corner of the universe—hospitality—the intelligence needed to generate P&L is already within the culture.
By the way, and in the spirit of truth-telling: all the words you read and pod-listen to across the Good Evening Everyone episodes, including this one, are simply impressions and thoughts pulled from my own mind. Nothing herein should be construed as representing the policies, processes, cultures, operators, individuals, events, or venues —past or present— associated with any of my employers, or clients.
On Budgeting, Tacit Knowledge, and Truth Seeking
Like most industries, hospitality plays the budgeting game. But before we dive in, it’s worth pausing to consider how tacit knowledge figures into budget inputs. Anyone can make numbers ascend in a spreadsheet. Not everyone can make the “P” in P&L real—because that takes understanding.
Tacit knowledge is the nuanced grasp of what’s really going on. Without this feel for the invisible mechanics that underlie delivery of a dish, a service moment, an experience—a spreadsheet is just a math exercise. But by embedding hidden truths into the spreadsheet’s logic, we can use it as a tool to spotlight operational areas in need of refinement or reinvention.
A basic budget says: “This hurts here, here, and here.” A good one says: “Let’s listen, hypothesize, test, and evolve.” The listening invites deeper truth-seeking. This process sharpens our understanding of what drives what, and just as importantly, what constrains what (bottlenecks). We’ll discuss constraints in future posts. Today’s work is threading truth-seeking through the organization’s cultural fabric.
When the culture fails to value talent that appreciates the nuances of profitability, and how those nuances are learned and shared, the roadmap gets loopy. And loopy is expensive, both in time and money. It breeds friction: the blame game, attrition, and decay in brand equity.
Avoid loopy. Hire individuals who care enough to collect and share their understanding. No one must arrive as an oracle, but everyone must understand that they’re expected to be both teacher and learner. It’s okay not to be the expert, so long as you’re eager to grasp the variables, the levers, and to articulate your learning process.
Budgeting as Puzzle-Solving
Once expertise in nuance becomes cultural, things get interesting. An unexpected byproduct? People enjoy learning, especially when the benefits are immediate. Puzzle-solving is enjoyable. Budgeting, believe it or not, is exactly that: assembling a jigsaw of truths.
Maybe someone will write a book explaining that it’s healthier to ditch the annual “b-word” (budget) and instead install a permanent “puzzling out our truths” process. If that were the norm, great talent might actually look forward to it.
A quick aside: this collaborative puzzle-solving builds trust. In restaurants, many people —often the guest-facing ones— are excluded from the roadmapping process. Imagine being a floor manager or hourly worker told daily to “work harder” to hit budget, while leadership fails to foster a culture of inclusion or puzzle-solving. That’s not trust; that’s noise.
The Gold in the Dining Room
Inclusivity adds immediate value. Everyone has tacit knowledge. Guest-facing staff may know more about what’s actually happening on the floor than leadership. Yet in hospitality, upward communication is often broken. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in daily ops is this: there’s gold in the dining room. Ignore it, and you’re bleeding value.
Caring and laziness are opposites. We’ve all seen lazy leadership, it’s as difficult to watch as it is pervasive. Lazy leaders don’t learn. They don’t seek truth. They pound the table instead. They’re mentally and often physically absent, while blocking the way. To them, staff are an inconvenience, they take no pleasure in mentoring. And when truth feels inconvenient, they prefer to dismiss the truth-seekers. This is how you lose the great people you’ve worked so hard to hire.
Screening for Cultural Health
Hypothesis testing is too much work for the lazy. But nothing corrodes culture faster than hand-waving and politics. One solution: make caring a hiring precondition. It helps filter out the lazy, who are just as toxic as fraudsters, harassers, and dead weight. Their tools are distraction, distortion, and dysfunction. Watch for their tells: secret deals, micromanagement, scapegoating, tirades, and shenanigans. Feel free to add your own.
Toxic hires —when not addressed swiftly— erode culture and chase off the caring individuals needed to produce the customer experiences we all strive for. Especially in hospitality, when frontline staff have no voice, they vote with their feet. That’s expensive to the organization, and unfair to the employee.
When shareholders don’t create reliable listening mechanisms—or worse, when bad actors intentionally sever them —value is destroyed. Talented people check out, either emotionally or literally. At that point, FOH and BOH staffing becomes a nightmare. Operations spiral. And the countdown to insolvency begins, limited only by the size of the treasury.
Truth-Seeking Is the Culture
Truth is the glue that holds teams together. A truth-seeking culture energizes talent and insulates against politics. It’s the same in restaurants and hotels: the culture that continuously solves for profitability —together— is all you need.
Human talent, shared tacit knowledge, golden insights from guests and data, and the tech to support it all —these are what determine P&L. Culture is the force multiplier, for better or for worse.
In future posts and episodes—with guest experts and in response to your requests—we’ll explore topics like how to co-create roadmaps, view costs in high-definition, mine for margin gold, and build cultures that screen, hire, and onboard talent capable of carrying the truth-seeking torch.
Oh—and one last thing: get good at spotting and solving cultural problems before your guests do.