545: Will Guidara - The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect (Unreasonable Hospitality)

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Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

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• "Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters."
• "My dad says "The best way to learn is to teach." He taught me to study for tests as if I were going in to deliver a presentation. At EMP, I made teaching part of our culture."
  • "Public speaking is a leadership skill."
• Excellence is about small details — A couple of examples of that were lighting and music.
  • "Maybe people don't notice every single individual detail, but in aggregate, they're powerful. In any great business, most of the details you closely attend to are ones that only a tiny, tiny percentage of people will notice."
• "Some of the best advice I ever got about starting in a new organization is; Don't cannonball. Ease into the pool."
• Magic: "Too many people approach creative brainstorming by taking what's practical into consideration way too early in the process. Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what's realistic or sustainable."
• "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." – Penn and Teller
• "Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they're ready."
• The daily 30-minute meeting: "A daily 30-minute meeting is where a collection of individuals becomes a team."
• Find hidden treasures: Will's dad had his own platoon in Vietnam. It wasn't a great platoon. On it was a guy nicknamed Kentucky, Kentucky was lazy and wasn't in great shape. He wasn't that smart, but he was skilled directionally and had a great feel for being in the woods.
  • "A leader's responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be."
• "Business like life is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and that hard." - Danny Meyer
• "In restaurants, our reason for being is to make people feel, seen, it's to make them feel welcome, it's to give them a sense of belonging. The food, the service, the design, they are simply ingredients in the recipe of human connection"
• "The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. I still give The One Minute Manager to every person I promote. It's an amazing resource, in particular on how to give feedback. My biggest takeaways were: Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion."
• "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
• "What criticism offers you, then, is an invitation to have your perspective challenged—or at least to grow by truly considering it. You might stick with a choice you've been criticized for or end up somewhere completely different. The endgame isn't the point as much as the process: you grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again."
• "The aggregation of marginal gains," or a small improvement in a lot of areas. In his words: "The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together."