The semester has officially started, and my philosophy students are already hard at work on assignments. To jumpstart the faculty and staff, my school invited Will Guidara to come speak to us. Out of all the talks and speeches I've heard through the course of my life, Will's talk has to rank in the top five or so.

If you're not familiar with Will Guidara, he's the author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, and a co-producer on the FX Emmy-winning show, The Bear. Oh, and he ran the #1 ranked restaurant in the world, Eleven Madison Park (EMP), in New York City.

To prepare for Will's visit to campus, and to rally the educational troops for this year, all the faculty and staff were given a copy of his book. I've loved reading it, and it meant a lot that my school put some thought and intention into equipping us to up-level this semester through a unifying event that involved a well-known name.

Will encouraged us to think about excellence at every step, giving us story after story and example after example from his restaurant days. He often ran an Interrogation of the Customer Journey (as he called it) at EMP, isolating well over 100 touch points with customers, and examining how to improve each point. He loved giving unscalable, unrepeatable experiences to customers, because seeing their faces of surprise and joy--often with tears--became addicting to the staff at EMP.

"Systematize graciousness."

To be the best restaurant in the world, it's not enough just to have the best product in the world (mind-blowing food). That's baseline. To be the best, you have to focus almost all your energy and intention on how you make the customers feel. And you have to do that with every customer touch point, for years.

If you manage to do all that, you might have a chance to earn a 4-star review in the New York Times, or be the only restaurant in history to go from two Michelin stars to four in only one year, or be ranked #1 in the top 50 restaurants in the world. EMP did all that under Will.

And after he had told his story, he looked out at all of the faculty and administrators and said,

That was really nice to hear from someone like him.

While the talk was absolutely excellent, and while the following takes nothing away from that, the obvious question many of us had was...how are we as faculty supposed to apply all this?

Now, I'm going to take away so many helpful principles from his message that I can apply to students in the classroom. No question. But it did strike me that teachers and professors have almost no external incentives or recognition for doing our job with excellence. We don't have New York Times reviews or Michelin stars or events where we get ranked. That's not a complaint; plenty of other jobs don't either. But if we want teachers to apply the same level of excellence to the "customers", the students, I could see incentives and recognition of some kind making quite a contribution to that goal. Especially since, unlike patrons at a 4-star restaurant, some of our customers are cranky about needing to be there in the first place.

Of course, I don't have a solution to this. If there is a solution, it will probably need to come from someone who isn't a teacher; who is a stakeholder in virtue of either being a student or being the parent of a student.

So please, get your ideas out there. Why wouldn't we want to publicly incentivize and recognize the outstanding teachers and professors from this noble profession?

Until next time.

Jared

This Week's Free Philosophy Resource:

Title: Transformative Education​

Author: L.A. Paul and John Quiggin

Reading Level: Undergraduate through graduate

Hang on to this idea of transformative experience. It will come up again soon.

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