Last night I happened to catch Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.  What a great show.  What made it interesting for me was noting Gordon’s tactics and the results he was able to produce.  It made for a fascinating study.^[1].

Ok the background on the episode;

Gordon is going to help Nick who runs Nick’s Bistro @ Rococo Restaurant in King’s Lynn.  Nick is a former Michelin Star Chef with £100k of debt.  Things aren’t looking good.

Gordon’s goal is to help Nick turn the place around.  He shows up and makes an assessment of the current environment.  He finds the following;

• Prices are high for what the local area will support (sales)
• Supplies are expensive and doesn’t take advantage of the local produce (expenses)
• Restaurant isn’t attracting customers (revenue)
• The food is pretentious and fussy (product)
• Nick doesn’t have a plan to change (leadership)

Gordon asks Nick about using local produce.  Nick says "blah blah blah" and rationalises away his actions.  Gordon goes out and does his own reconnaissance and finds out that Nick’s perception just isn’t reality.  He then takes Nick out to show him the reality of the local suppliers. (management information)

Next he gives the team a little test so he can see check their thinking and skill level. (performance data)  He does a ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’ and gives them 20 minutes to prepare a dish.  They make one dish.  Gordon says "look you could have made a starter and a main with the same ingredients and made a good profit."  He now has a read on how in tune they are with making money.

Gordon has used all this to create what John Kotter calls a sense of urgency.  The stage is now set for a change to occur.  Start the transformation.  Gordon helps the team create a new environment.  He does this by;

• Changing the menu
• Renaming the restaurant to Maggie’s
• Redecorating
• Gets Nick to throw away the ego items (ie guide books that say how great Nick’s old restaurant was in years gone by).^[2]
• Goes out into the town to announce the new restaurant. (marketing on a shoe string)

To try and ensure that the changes stick, Gordon seeks out the allies around Nick who will provide reinforcement to help him keep these new behaviours and changes on track.

The process Gordon has taken Nick through is modelled after the Kübler-Ross curve.^[3]  First Nick denies there is a problem.  Then he increases the resistance as demonstrated by him locking Gordon out of the restaurant.  He then lets Gordon back in and says, ‘last night I had a good cry…I have hit the bottom and the penny has finally dropped.’

Gordon says good, now lets move forward.  Fair play to Nick, he does move forward and two months later, on a return visit, Gordon finds things turned around.  Nick says all the suppliers are paid up to date and things are in order.  The restaurant is again profitable.

I was struck by this show because Gordon demonstrates so many of the elements that we are trying to get across to people in business;

• Pinpoint the result you want to achieve
• Analyse the current situation
• Change the environment
• Evaluate the change
• Sustain the change

All of this activity is underpinned by data.

The bit I find interesting is that Gordon uses Negative Reinforcement to create the sense of urgency and change.  (I think this is absolutely the right approach.)  He then attempts to provide a little bit of Positive Reinforcement to sustain the change.

The set of behaviours he uses to create results are tipped more toward the negative.  The language laced with ‘F’ this and that is insulting.  His dose of punishment often leads to the other party shutting down in his presence or a delayed outburst once the bully has left.   (The scrappier ones come back swinging.) 

To have a sustainable model, the use of negative reinforcement to create a sense of urgency must be done inside the context of a positive environment.  The leader has to have spent time building trust with the performers before they have the credibility to deliver the negative reinforcement.  If this process is rushed the performers often feel like they are just being punished and will seek revenge on the organisation.

Most leaders I know don’t even do a good line in creating a negative environment like Gordon.  They simply issue empty threats to their staff and then spend time alone or with their mates.  They create a work environment of extinction. 

When we start to talk to these leaders about performance they take the same stance that Nick took; look I am a professional, I know what I am doing, there isn’t anything wrong here, anyway what do you know.  What they need is a sense of urgency, they need some data, they need a good dose of negative reinforcement to get them to wake up and smell the coffee.

Now to find a leader inside the organisation who is interested in performance.  Once you find that creating a sense of urgency becomes a whole lot easier.

Besides talent, one thing Gordon has over most leaders is a focus on performance.  He knows his target and stays over it the whole time.  He has some amazing instincts,^[4] that serve him well.  There is no doubt that he is very successful. 

Do I want him to change? No. 

Why?  It just wouldn’t be good television if he did.

1. ↑1 Although I am not sure my wife enjoyed the running commentary.  Since we have Sky+ she could always rewind to catch what she missed during my excited outbursts
2. ↑2 This is an interesting point.  Daniel Goldman of Emotional Intelligence fame suggests that IQ + EQ > EGO if you are going to be successful.  Nick has got this equation out of balance and it has prevented him from seeing reality.  He is cooking for his EGO not for his customers.
3. ↑3 See my earlier post about A Serious Dose of Negative Reinforcement.
4. ↑4 In another episode Gordon got a pub turned around by creating the campaign for real gravy.  Simple, elegant and easy for all the pub’s staff to understand and execute.