Union Square Hospitality Group

But there's a lot of there's not a day goes by that I don't think about how we can use our creativity to make Shake Shack even better.

Well, you know, one of the really interesting takeaways from that experience, you had at Union Square Hospitality Group experimented with creating other fast casual concepts.

And I think you came to the conclusion that it's not a good idea to plan to build an ambitious large-scale outcome when you're trying to build a business, that it's better to focus on what you call purposeful inputs, right? That to me, I mean, this sort of almost accidental serendipitous origin story of Shake Shack, but the love and care that was put into it, the intentionality seems to be part of how you explain its success.

Is that fair?

I'm recording Tuesday afternoon, October 27th.

I just saw Danny Meyer, the wonderful restaurateur, Union Square Hospitality Group, Shake Shack and all the rest.

I just saw him give a talk at a local club for lunch and I was reminded of what a wise man he is.

And the good news is we've had him on this podcast before.

And like, if you look at it, you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense.

Why would I invest any time to do that many posts? What's the ROI of that? And I would say the ROI of that is I got to sit down with Danny Meyer for last week for the founder of Shake Shack and Union Square Hospitality Group.

Why? Because Instagram was one of the many tools that we use, but it helped us connect the dots.

So be very conscious about the the metric that you use, but also humans connect, different humans connect to the analytical side.

And that's much more specific than be useful, right? Because you are saying your definition of usefulness, the way that people can be uniquely helpful in your organization is...

by giving like giving other people the direction that they were missing and showing them in fact that it's not it's not what they it's not what they thought they were going or like create the map or you you find your version of it but i think just a simple phrase like that it goes a long way i remember i'll just give you one other example of this um I remember one of the first conversations I ever had with Danny Meyer, who is an amazing restaurateur who created Union Square Hospitality Group, and you probably know him best for Shake Shack.

And Danny was, he was telling me about training his staff.

And he said, I really care about attention to detail.

[on-hold music] I have this tremendous push me, pull you relationship with growth because I wanna stay pure to who we are, and I don't ever want the growth to dilute our excellence or our hospitality, and certainly not our culture.

For more than four decades, Danny Meyer, founder and executive chairman of Union Square Hospitality Group, has built his career by questioning assumptions about how restaurants are supposed to work.

Early on, that meant challenging the idea that serious food required a formal setting, that warmth, familiarity, and a sense of home somehow made a restaurant less ambitious.

Later, it meant challenging some of his own assumptions about growth, culture, and what could actually be scaled.

Essentiality leads to legacy because that's what people remember the most.

[instrumental music] From Union Square Cafe to Shake Shack, Meyer kept challenging assumptions about what a restaurant should mean to its neighborhood, the cost of growth, and how a company's values survive change.

As Union Square Hospitality Group grew and his role shifted, one question stayed constant: How do you build a business around how people feel, and can that feeling scale? For Meyer, the answer was in creating the culture, clear enough to be shared, flexible enough to evolve, and strong enough to carry forward.

[instrumental music] Thanks for listening to Exceptional Leaders from Morgan Stanley.

It requires a fundamental shift in leadership philosophy.

And this ties directly into the notes we have here about Danny Meyer at Union Square Hospitality Group and the recent public comments from the CEO of Nestle.

Right.

I was looking at that.