by Dan Charnas
THE TIE-UP: FINISHING WHEN YOU CAN’T FINISH
We had about 90 minutes of work left on our immersive project, and we have only 30 minutes until we need to start prepping for the meeting. Since we can’t finish our current project in 30 minutes, our next best alternative is to try to find a way to tie our work up so that we can finish it later.
The first step is to find a stopping point. Do we stop now or try to get as much done as possible? We can still work on it for 30 minutes. But we decide that it’s probably better to start our meeting prep earlier, to make first moves now because we can have a cushion of time in case complications arise. So instead we decide to work for only 15 more minutes, just to outline the part of our project we haven’t done, so that when we resume, we’ll have a quicker ramp-up time to finish the action.
The second step is to set expectations, to call the person who gave us the deadline. We ask for a 2-hour extension (another cushion) and figure maybe we can stay at work a little later tonight. It turns out, however, that our colleague has been called into the same meeting as we have. Everyone is behind. We don’t have to stay late. We just have to find some time tomorrow to finish. But instead of immediately resuming our immersive work—that’s our instinct, to rush now that the pressure is on—we take 30 seconds to find the time on tomorrow’s schedule and block off 90 minutes for our current project.
THE TRIAGE: CLEARING THE DECKS
This new meeting has pushed two other Actions off our schedule. And since we know that they are less crucial than the meeting, we can clear our calendar without fear. We will make sure that tonight, during our Daily Meeze, we reschedule those items.
But because of our new budget meeting, a new opportunity arises to execute an Action, “Get approval on new program.” We can actually take care of that in the new budget we’re making. In this way, we practice balanced movement, using one motion for multiple moves.
THE RUSH: SLOWING DOWN AND INSPECTING
We and our colleagues work furiously to prepare our budgets in time for the meeting. But we’re making mistakes—leaving out information, paying less attention to details. We decide to take a breath, literally. We stand up, stretch, and think: What’s the most important thing we can be doing to deliver this assignment? Getting the numbers right. So we work slower this time, even though the clock is ticking. As we work, we notice something odd: The budget is missing some line items that we saw on a colleague’s spreadsheet. We take a few moments to consult with our colleague and realize, to our dismay, we’ve been working on an earlier version of the budget, the wrong version. We’ll have to redo our work, quickly. But if we hadn’t allowed ourselves extra time for prep, and if we hadn’t slowed down and used the buddy system to inspect and correct our work, we might have missed the mistake altogether and put forth budget numbers that would have shortchanged us.
THE MEETING: PRACTICING PRESENCE
While we’re in the meeting, we are obsessing about the mistake we made: How did we miss that new budget?
Suddenly we realize that we’re spacing out in the meeting. So we jot down a quick note—“Explore budget mistake”—in our notebook and make an effort to be more present: We put our pen down, we turn our body to face the colleague who’s speaking, we keep eye contact, we breathe, we listen.
THE MISTAKE: RUNNING ROUTINES
Part of our commitment to excellence is using process to remedy and redeem mistakes. We view error as a chance to get better. In this case we decide to take a few minutes to figure out how we spent nearly an hour working on the wrong budget form. We realize that we had that new budget all along. We listed it as an Action in one of our Mission lists, but as a Backburner item that kept getting pushed back. We mention this to a colleague, and he commiserates: “They send too many e-mails. No way we can read them all.”
Years ago we would have agreed. But we have a different view of responsibility now. Other people are reading these things and taking them seriously. We can’t say we don’t have time. Time to step up. Since Routines are the way we make time for things that we “don’t have time” for, we make a commitment to establishing a new one: 30 minutes of reading every Friday before we leave for the weekend, for all the reports and articles and meeting minutes we get sent throughout the week. The new Routine will squeeze even more time from our ability to do immersive work, but because we are managing more people and a bigger budget now, we know that this kind of process work comes with the territory.
The other reason we missed the new budget is that we didn’t remember to check to make sure we had the latest version when we were editing. There is, now, simply too much to remember to keep it all in our head. So we decide to perfect our moves: We make a note to create a new checklist to run when submitting budgets, because financial documents are too important to our well-being to miss details like this.
EVENING: PREPARATION
It’s 4:30 p.m. and our meeting is done. We actually do have the time, exactly 90 minutes, to finish the report that we had to push until tomorrow. We can finish it now and still get home on time.
But because we’ve already rescheduled that obligation for tomorrow, pushed it safely off our plate, we decide to do to our 30-minute Daily Meeze a little earlier today. Setting a timer, we go through our 15 minutes of cleaning our station. Because we’ve been assiduously flagging e-mails and clearing our inbox all day, we get through everything quickly. And because we’ve also been tinkering with tomorrow’s schedule, we don’t have much to add to it (nor can we, our tomorrow being pretty much filled with the work we pushed off today). We use the extra time in our Daily Meeze session to do some deeper cleaning at our desk—purging some old files and making space.
We can actually be spontaneous, leave now, and get home at least an hour earlier than usual. It would be nice to surprise our family in some way.
Maybe we’ll cook.
Without even thinking about what we’re doing, our left hand reaches for our notebook and our right for a pen.
We begin by making a list. . . .
CONCLUSION
The Miracle of Mise-en-Place
In modern life, there are few things we dread more than cleaning up a pile of work.
Yet cleaning itself is relatively easy—we can do it with the sweep of a hand or the flick of a cursor.
Establishing a system is also easy—lots of lists, color-coded schedules, empty manila folders, markers, and good intentions.
The hardest thing to do is maintain that system, to actually work clean: with space, with time, with resources, with people.
With our Daily Meeze we can maintain any system, because our Daily Meeze is a system of organization designed to maintain systems of organization.
And the idea that underlies our Daily Meeze is the same one that underlies mise-en-place as a whole: Excellence requires human presence.
Excellence is why, in this age of fast food, people still visit high-end restaurants. It’s why, even in the age of technology and robotics, the most sought-after products are often crafted by hand and the most expensive services are personal. It’s why, even though corporations are born, grow, and become hugely profitable, these same companies teeter and fall as their customers leave and their managers and employees flee.
You can’t automate excellence, though we will likely keep trying. It’s futile. Why? Because people are actually worth something. Thus Work Clean is a manifesto for people who see a future for people.
People like you who cultivate a personal mise-en-place know that no teacher, no system, no software, no algorithm, no company, and even no amount of money or resources can do the job for you. You are the one who has to push the button. You are the one who must decide. You are the one who must make the moves and take the steps. But you understand the sacrifice and choices and work involved.
The miracle is you.
EPILOGUE
The Dishwasher
The teenager standing at the pot sink beheld the job before him. Perhaps tens of thou
sands of adolescents in restaurants across the country at that same moment faced a similar sight, wanting nothing more than to leave work, play ball, listen to music, hang with friends, or engage in other youthful diversions. The dishwasher at the Palm Beach Yacht Club in Florida desired those things, too. But rather than carelessly dash through the work, Thomas Keller decided the quickest route to the outside world would be to wash the dishes with as much care as he could muster.
The first thing Thomas realized was that to get the work done quickly, his movements had to be small and efficient. To be efficient, his movements had to repeat. Thomas grew to respect and love repetition, doing one thing, over and over. For his movements to be repetitive meant that the dishes themselves had to be organized, stacked in a predictable pattern—bread plates here, service plates here, dessert plates there. He began demanding that the servers return those plates to him in a predictable manner.
The point of washing dishes, Thomas decided, was to actually get them clean. Why leave crud on plates if it meant he had to redo them, doubling his work? The thing he liked about his job was that he didn’t have to guess whether he was doing it right. He got instant critical feedback. If he didn’t stack, scrape, scrub, spray, and then inspect the dishes correctly, he saw the results seconds later when the dish machine door opened. Washing dishes in this way became a sport. Thomas didn’t like losing. He made corrections.
Every sport has its rituals, and those of the dishwasher became indispensable for Thomas. The first thing he did every morning was clean the bathrooms. Every 2 hours, he changed the water in the dish machine. He changed the soap at specific times. He took the garbage out at specific times. He swept the floor at specific times. The exactitude was critical. If he didn’t start or finish tasks at certain times, that might cause a cascade of events that would keep him working longer and less effectively. If he didn’t change the water in the dish machine regularly, the strainer baskets would fill with pieces of food, and soon the dishes would be covered in sediment, and he’d have to run them through again. If he didn’t take the garbage out, the garbage can would overflow, causing more mess. He learned that if he started messing with ritual, suddenly it wasn’t a ritual anymore. Even if the garbage wasn’t completely full, he emptied it. He didn’t mess with time. You could see the results of not doing so.
Thomas finally saw that he was a crucial member of a team whose sole purpose was to feed the guests. The guests needed food and drink. Thus the cooks needed dishes, the bartenders needed glasses, and the servers needed silverware. And one person, Thomas, gave them all those things. Without him nothing worked.
The behaviors Thomas Keller learned as a dishwasher—organization, efficiency, feedback, rituals, repetition, and teamwork—stayed with him when he was promoted to cook. He kept them when he moved up to Rhode Island and met his first mentor, Chef Roland Henin. The disciplines supported him as he worked his way through fine kitchens in New York, where he became a chef of a renowned restaurant. They sustained him after he left that restaurant rather than compromise those disciplines. They steered him to California, where he found a small restaurant in the Napa Valley called The French Laundry, and they helped him round up the money to buy the place. They powered him as he cooked through the lean years, through his first good review, and his first Michelin stars. They kept him humble even when he was named the best chef in America by the James Beard Foundation. And they grounded him when he opened restaurants around the country and became the chief executive of his own corporation. For Thomas Keller, the six disciplines of the dishwasher, as he calls them, have guided his trajectory from the start and lead him still.
It starts with organization. The French Laundry makes sense. When something offends Keller’s eye or feels just slightly off, the chef starts asking how he can make it better, and he doesn’t stop asking until he finds an answer and good sense is restored. He’ll question anything, even the sacrosanct. The tools of chefs and cooks are sacred. Cooks guard their knives. Keller cherishes his spoons; he’s had some for decades. “God forbid if I should lose one,” he says. Those holy items travel with the cook in a vessel, the knife roll, the daily opening of which looks just like a sacrament. But Keller always found these knife bags unsightly and inefficient, stowed on top of shelves at cooks’ stations with their straps hanging down. So he decided to get rid of them. He built knife drawers at every station and asked his cooks to keep their tools in the kitchen.
The idea of leaving their precious knives in an unlocked drawer overnight felt alien to his cooks, but for Keller the exercise was about building a team as much as it was about organization. “These are your colleagues,” he says. “Why shouldn’t you trust them? If you need to borrow one of my knives for whatever reason, I’m going to trust that you’re going to not only use it properly, but you’re going to clean it, you’re going to return it to my drawer.”
Keller asks his cooks to abide by rituals like “shaking in and shaking out.” When cooks arrive, they walk around, shake everybody’s hand, and say hello. This is our house, Keller says. This is how we respect one another. Departure works the same way. If cooks don’t shake out, the other cooks notice.
Even Keller’s take on efficiency is geared more toward personal growth than productivity. That plaque beneath the wall clock that reads “Sense of Urgency” isn’t about the customer’s meal; it’s about the cook’s career. “The sense of urgency is defined in our kitchen as an opportunity for you to finish your job before you have to finish your job,” Keller says. “If you have aspirations and ambitions to become the poissonier, for example, then you can actually have time to go over to the fish station and work with the poissonier for 15 or 20 minutes and learn something. . . . You’re going to get to the next level by being ready for the next level before that opportunity arises. Because when I look around the kitchen, I’m going to choose the person who’s already prepared to be that person. That’s a mise-en-place that is an individual mise-en-place,” Keller says. A career mise-en-place.
Because Keller values repetition, he’s floored when young apprentices declare that they’re bored. You’re a cook, he says. Get used to it. You’re going to be doing this the rest of your life. Keller puts his new cooks in the back room by themselves at night: skimming stocks, making shells for truffle egg custard, cutting vegetables. But the night shift isn’t relaxed; it’s 5 hours of compressed work, punctuated by unpredictable requests from the kitchen during dinner service. This, says Keller, is the life of a chef: balancing work that a cook knows must be done against constant interruptions and new requests. Through these challenges, he sees his apprentices craning their necks toward the kitchen. They want in on the action. But Keller says: Pay attention to what you’re doing here. You can learn. It’s repetition. It’s responsibility. It’s self-motivation. It’s interruption. Being ready for all the unknowns.
But of all the disciplines, Keller knows that taking and giving feedback is the hardest to learn and teach. Keller warns his young cooks: You’re going to get feedback all day long. You have to take it as just pure information. There’s nothing personal here. You can’t be crippled by critical feedback. You have to grow through it. At the same time, Keller encourages his chefs and managers to be, literally, soft spoken. “When I whisper, they’re leaning in,” he says. “They’re getting close to hear me. You yell at somebody, they’re pulling away from you. When you’re giving really critical feedback, you want them coming in to you. I’m really disappointed in you doing that. Then they go, Oh my God. It becomes so much louder to them.”
Thomas Keller still envisions his job as a sport, where he is no longer a player but the coach of a franchise charged with cultivating, training, and promoting a deep bench of talent. He coaches with the disciplines of the dishwasher, the disciplines of mise-en-place. “I think they pretty much can be translated to almost any profession,” Keller says.
The dividend of these values is excellence. The price is constant attention. “You can never stop asking
the question: ‘How can I do something better?’” Keller says. “Once you stop asking the question, you’ll never do it.”
Outside Keller’s kitchens, that attention to planning, process, and presence is often too high a price to pay.
“Mediocrity has become something that’s acceptable,” Keller says, “and in many cases, something that is aspirational.”
To get by and get over, to work less and get paid, to be, essentially, above work. Many people pursue this American dream.
Keller, America’s greatest chef, pursues another. He works toward it as he always has: He beholds his kitchen. If there are dishes to be done, he washes them. If the floor is dirty, he picks up a broom and he cleans.
INTERVIEWS
Many thanks to these chefs, cooks, bakers, chef-instructors, culinary faculty, culinary students, managers, waitstaff, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs for sharing their observations, experiences, and behaviors in interviews and discussion either in person or by phone. Though the narrative of this book focuses primarily on a select few of these people, all were helpful in creating the philosophical bedrock for this project.
Ilan Ades
Chris Albert
Carlos Arciniega
Candy Argondizza
Greg Barr
Denise Bauer
Riccardo Bertolino
Rachel Black
Ari Bokovza
Caitlyn Borgfeld
Jimmy Bradley
Elizabeth Briggs
Eric Bromberg
Matt Campion
Hailey Catalano
Dominick Cerrone
Richard Coppedge
Juanito Cordero
Chris Cosentino
Jessica Crochet
Lucian Davis