What You're Really Meant to Do: A Road Map for Reaching Your Unique Potential by Robert Steven Kaplan

Author:Robert Steven Kaplan [Kaplan, Robert Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781422189900
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2013-04-30T07:00:00+00:00

The Chef Who Got Sick of His Job

I met with a restaurant operator who was taking the “Owner President” course at Harvard. He had originally started a midpriced Italian restaurant on the West Coast and over the years had expanded to three locations. Like many people attending that executive education program, he was hoping to improve his leadership and business skills and to use the time to reflect on whether he wanted to make some changes in his life and career. He started by telling me that he was getting sick of running restaurants.

I asked him why.

“First, it’s getting tougher to be a small business owner,” he said. “Insurance costs and health care costs are rising. As we’ve grown, there are more management issues to deal with, and there are more administrative issues generally. I feel like I’m working harder just to keep up, and sometimes I feel like I’m getting squeezed in a vise.”

The chef’s father and paternal grandfather had been successful business executives. They were not thrilled with his decision to attend culinary school, become a chef, and open a restaurant. He observed that it wasn’t easy for him being the third generation of his family living in the same town. Although he loved his father and grandfather—both still alive—they directly and indirectly put a lot of pressure on him, and he often felt he couldn’t live up to their expectations.

His father had a dominant personality. “He thinks he’s an authority on everything,” the chef told me, “and needs to have the last word on most matters.” This attitude might have worked with his father’s subordinates, but it did not sit very well with his own son.

I asked him to try to forget about the current situation for a few minutes and recall a situation in which he felt at his best and felt great about what he was doing. “I’ll have to think about that,” he said. “OK, it was when I was running my first restaurant about ten years ago. We were smaller then. I got a thrill every day from creating dishes and serving customers. I do love to come up with new dishes, I love meeting the patrons, and I love the atmosphere of a restaurant. I’m good at it, and I think we help put a smile on people’s faces. For me, it’s really a blessing to be able to do this work.” He was beaming.

“So, why were you just talking about being sick of running a restaurant? And how’d you get yourself stuck in this current situation?”

He laughed. Building three restaurants with a large number of employees felt like a “big deal—it made me feel like more of a success.” He then got quiet for a minute. “Damn it, I must admit that I probably added new locations to impress my father, and maybe folks in the community. I was looking for ways to get the monkey off my back—I was tired of feeling I had to prove something. Ironically, running three

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