For someone like me, who has a complicated and fraught relationship with carbohydrates, the phrase “unlimited breadsticks” should always come with a trigger warning. That’s the main reason I cannot claim to be a regular diner at the Olive Garden: It’s either unlimited breadsticks or I fit into my pants. It cannot be both.
But for the purposes of this story — it’s really more of an analogy — let’s put that aside and concentrate on what the Olive Garden is as a business category, which is a chain of crowd-pleasing and well-lit casual restaurants.
The business is doing pretty well despite the rocketing inflation that’s cutting into the profit margins of pretty much everyone. But it wasn’t always such a strong enterprise. A few years ago, the Garden was in trouble. Same-location sales had declined, the average check size went down, and customer satisfaction was low. The chain was in desperate need of new management.
When the new operators arrived to turn the company around, they didn’t follow the usual playbook of private equity sharks circling a distressed asset. They didn’t bust up the company for parts, shutter locations, and sell off the pieces. Instead, they did something a little different. They went to work — at an actual Olive Garden.
The new CEO issued a decree: He and his team, and the new board of directors, had to work for one night at the Olive Garden, serving diners pasta and unlimited salad bowls.
And yes, it was just one night. And yes, how hard could that be? But the truth is, for most of those people, my guess is it was very, very hard.
Put it this way: When was the last time the CEO of a major corporation got barked at by a guy in a T-shirt for not having enough ice in the iced tea? Or a Harvard MBA had to make it snappy with the breadsticks?
What was revealed during that no doubt hectic and stressful and error-filled night is something that the waiters and managers and line cooks at the Olive Garden could have told them anytime had they asked. I can only imagine the amount of eye-rolling and suppressed laughter from the on-the-line staff of the Olive Garden, watching pampered suits try to remember who got the dressing on the side, who wanted to swap tomato sauce for Alfredo sauce, who didn’t want onions, who wanted extra cheese.
And I’m pretty sure there’s nothing funnier than watching the chief financial officer of a billion-dollar restaurant chain trying to refill a water glass by pouring from the side of the pitcher like an old pro. You really do need actual skills to do that.
And yet the result of that fiery trial was that they learned an awful lot about their business. They learned what was working and what was failing and that it was hard to fix certain things and why. They learned to simplify their offerings and support their key employees (and they learned who those key employees were), and they discovered that there’s a whole layer in the organizational chart that is categorically and reliably full of crap.
In other words, they learned how to make money again.
As American businesses face some real economic headwinds — inflation, a possible recession, a lackluster fourth quarter, an anxious consumer — they’ll be tempted to try a lot of things like stock buybacks and mergers and sell-offs. They’ll be tempted to sit in their offices and listen to consultants, bankers, and financial engineers. They’ll read market research and consumer confidence forecasts. They’ll do all of this instead of actually going to work.
When Pol Pot, the psychopathic mass murderer who ruled Cambodia from 1976 to 1979, took over the country, one of his first actions was to evict people from the cities and drive them into the countryside. He was especially fixated on intellectuals, business people — elites of any kind. Let me stipulate, unequivocally, that Pol Pot was a genocidal monster, one of history’s greatest villains, a person who in no way should be emulated or admired.
I’ll say it again: Pol Pot very, very bad. Pol Pot not a role model. And yet there’s a tiny, itty-bitty little nugget of common sense in the impulse to get people out of the office and into the field. Obviously, again, Pol Pot went way, way too far. We can all agree on that.
And yet. There’s a hard glowing kernel of smart business thinking behind the idea that if your business is in trouble, the solution is not going to come from an investment banker or expensive consultant. All you need to know about fixing your business can be found somewhere low on the organizational chart — in the field, on the factory floor, in the showroom, behind the service counter, carrying a basket of warm breadsticks to a hungry customer.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
