Restaurant smart means exceptional hospitality and culinary skill. Corporate smart means managing finances and scaling without overspending. The speaker argues these are two separate intelligences, and leaders need both to succeed.
Being restaurant smart and corporate smart. In the book Unreasonable Hospitality, the author talks about his experience working in first a great restaurant, and then a restaurant company, and then a big restaurant company, and then working in restaurants for over the course of his career. And the one thing he finds is that different people have different kinds of smart smarts with the business. And some people are what he calls restaurant smart, which is very good hospitality, very good at creating food, very great at service that the customers are going to love, really getting that dialed in. And some people are very corporate smart, being able to manage the bottom line, being able to facilitate that, the aforementioned creativity, uh, without it having to be something that's going to break the bank all the time, i.e., you know, charging actually for food. The difference between those two things is real, and you should be asking which you have more of and which you should work on.
