Page 41 - Foodservice Magazine October 2018
P. 41

MANAGEMENT
41
Truly innovative people are quite rare. I see this demonstrated in commercial kitchens all the time ... About one in ten cooks seem to have the ability to innovate to some degree, and only about one in fifty is gifted artistically.
best ideas come from relatively junior members of staff.
Truly innovative people are quite rare. I see this demonstrated in commercial kitchens all the time. The majority of cooks are capable of fashionable production if given creative guidance, but without it they are lost and
tend to produce stereotyped food. About one in ten cooks seem to have the ability to innovate to some degree, and only about one in fifty is gifted artistically. I suspect that the same ratios would be found
in other occupations. For the majority of people innovation seems to consist of plagiarising and developing other peoples’ ideas. Observe how quickly an original idea from one of the ‘gastronomic gurus’ appears on menus elsewhere.
I’m not putting a value judgment on pinching ideas and inferring that it is wrong, by the way. It seems to be normal, human behaviour. After all, isn’t that what fashion is? Copying someone else’s ideas like a bunch of lemmings?
If you’re gifted and can innovate yourself, that’s fantastic. You are special and you should develop your skills. The remainder of us need to develop some mechanism to stay in touch with the rest of the world and to stay ahead. This usually means
getting out of your business
and going around checking out your competition at regular intervals, getting a feel for what is happening and what the public are responding to at the time.
I’m surprised how many business owners don’t do this. It’s not unusual for me to strike someone who has become so involved with the demands of their own business that they have not taken the time to assess the market for some years. The top restaurateurs evaluate each other constantly – that’s one of the reasons they stay on top. Others assume their initial success will continue on into the future and bog down into stagnation and decline. Once this happens it’s usually too late to save the business.


































































































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