Restaurants and Gangsters: Looking for Change in All the Wrong Places

November 3, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

It doesn’t surprise me that 37Signals, one of my favorite companies, and author(s) of Signal vs. Noise, one of the few blogs that I religiously read and recommend, raves about the same makeover show that I love and that I’ve blogged about. (Personally, I prefer the original BBC version of Kitchen Nightmares. Its not as edgy or extreme, but for me, it has more humanity than the American show.)

I have little overtly in common with 37 Signals although I am a small customer and hope to be a bigger one. I’m not a software developer or tech guru, yet their philosophy continually inspires me. It comes down to a similar way of looking at the world, seeing links and patterns in seemingly disparate media, and then putting it together for a new perspective that hopefully leads to positive change.

After seeing American Gangster yesterday, I won’t be surprised if some of my favorite bloggers are as blown away as I was by Denzel Washington’s lecture to Cuba Gooding about the promise of the Blue Magic powder (a.k.a. heroin) brand and how that brand promise must not be diluted. The fact that its so incongruous (murderous fiend drug lord to murderous fiend drug lord on the brand promise) is what makes it stick. Also, its a perfectly communicated pitch: spare, succinct, simple, passionate and business jargon free.

What Gordon Ramsay can teach software developers: “

In Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay does make-overs on failing restaurants and turns them into respectable enterprises through a combination of cuisine guidance, managerial pruning, and loads of swearing when things fail to meet his standards.

It’s a fantastic show that gives grim insight to the scary state of affairs of the chosen spots, but it also goes beyond the schadenfreude and saves these places from going out of business.

What makes Ramsay’s approach to restaurant revamping so interesting, though, is how applicable it feels to software design. The characteristics of a failing eatery ring remarkably similar to those of a poorly-run software product:

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

Filed under: Consciousness, career, going solo
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