IN SEPTEMBER 1994, I traveled to Dallas, Texas, to begin a tour promoting The Union Square Cafe Cookbook. During a dinner hosted on my behalf by the owner of San Saba Vineyards, Dr. Mark Lemmon, at the Mansion at Turtle Creek, I had a chance to sit next to Stanley Marcus, the department store mogul, whose family had founded the luxury department store Neiman Marcus in Dallas in 1907. Marcus was then nearly ninety, and for more than half a century he had used his genius as a marketer and retailer to expand the Neiman Marcus chain and burnish its reputation for extraordinary ser vice. It turned out that he was interested in meeting me too; although he had dined at Union Square Cafe through the years, we had never had a chance to connect one-on-one.
It should have been a wonderful evening—here I was, seated next to a legendary figure whose company I admired greatly. But I was preoccupied. Gramercy Tavern had just opened, in late July, and in part because of all the early media hype, it was getting knocked around in the press. I
was deeply troubled by this, and also by Union Square Cafe’s performance, which was wobbly. Union Square Cafe wasn’t used to operating without me at the helm every minute of the day. I had betrayed my own commitment to expand only if I was certain I could do so without compromising quality there. I confessed all this to Stanley and told him that I felt guilty for traveling out of town so soon after opening Gramercy Tavern.
“Opening this new restaurant,” I said, “might be the worst mistake I’ve ever made.” Stanley set his martini down, looked me in the eye, and said, “So you made a mistake. You need to understand something important. And listen to me carefully: The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.”
His words remained with me through the night. I repeated them over and over to myself, and it led to a turning point in the way I approached business. The problem wasn’t that I naively believed in perfection. Perfection is impossible in business. As a company policy, the notion of perfection can be dangerous, and the folly of pursuing it can stunt your team’s willingness to take intelligent risks. How could I expect my staff to create “legends of hospitality” if they were playing it safe by trying to avoid mistakes?
Stanley’s lesson reminded me of something my grandfather Irving Harris had always told me: “The definition of business is problems.” His philosophy came down to a simple fact of business life: success lies not in the elimination of problems but in the art of creative, profitable problem solving. The best companies are those that distinguish themselves by solving problems most effectively.
Indeed, business is problem solving. As human beings, we are all fallible. You’ve got to welcome the inevitability of mistakes if you want to succeed in the restaurant business—
or in any business. It’s critical for us to accept and embrace our ongoing mistakes as opportunities to learn, grow, and profit. Baseball’s top hitters can make seven mistakes out of every ten at-bats, and still ride a .300 lifetime batting average into the Hall of Fame.
We also need to expect the unexpected. We never know in advance if the next pitch will sail up and in or down and away. Will it be a fastball, a forkball, or a knuckleball? For us, the secret of the game is anticipating mistakes, harnessing them, and addressing them in constructive ways so that we end up in a better spot than if we had never made them in the first place.
I like to think of our staff members not as servers, but as surfers. Surfing is an arduous sport, and no one pursues it involuntarily. No one forces you to become a surfer, but if you choose to do it, there’s no point in wasting energy trying to tame the ocean of its waves. Waves are like mistakes. You can count on the fact that there will always be another wave, so your choice is to get back on the surfboard and anticipate it. The degree to which you ride it with better form than the next guy is how you improve and distinguish yourself.
The style with which a company rides the tough waves and addresses mistakes can define its heart, soul, and talent. Otherwise, there is no art to doing business. Our company is populated with surfers—fortunately, since in the restaurant business you can always count on another wave.
In our restaurants, we’ve experienced all kinds of mistakes, mishaps, and adversity. Once a large dried floral arrangement caught fire in the dining room, with flames shooting ten feet high. We’ve survived electrical failures and
flooding; we’ve called EMS units after guests have passed out in the middle of the dining room. We’ve seen a mouse once run across a guest’s white tablecloth, and a beetle turn up in someone’s salad. Back when we permitted smoking, a two-inch cigar ash was flicked from the upstairs balcony down into someone’s bowl of risotto at Union Square Cafe. A drunk man took his pants down and mooned our guests through the outside window of our front dining room. We’ve sent out our share of garments for quick dry cleaning when servers have accidentally spilled soup or drizzled olive oil on designer scarves hanging over the backs of chairs. But the worst mistake is not to figure out some way to end up in a better place after having made a mistake. We call that “writing a great last chapter.” Whatever mistake happened, happened. And the person on the receiving end will naturally want to tell anyone who’s interested all about it.
That’s to be expected. While we can’t erase what happened, we do have the power to write one last episode so that at least the story ends the way we want. If we write a great one, we will earn a comeback victory with the guest. Also, the guest will have no choice but to focus on how well we responded to the mistake when telling anyone we made it.
We can, then, turn a mistake into something positive. To be effective, the last chapter must be written imaginatively, graciously, generously, and sincerely. And sometimes we even write a great last chapter when it was the guest, not us, who made the mistake. If someone spills his or her glass at the bar, we pour another round, period. A child once spilled a glass of Sprite at his table, so we bought all six members of his family a round of what they were drinking. If a guest doesn’t like his or her dish, it is to be removed from the bill.
I have found that when you acknowledge a mistake and genuinely express your regret at having made it, guests will almost always give you a chance to earn back their favor.
Take, for example, a mistake as simple as a dropped plate of food. If a waiter who is heading for a table of six accidentally drops a plate on the way there, five people in the party will have hot food but a sixth guest will be left with nothing to eat. Do we make all six people wait? Do we leave one person feeling awkward while the other five eat? We deliver the five ready dishes, and, checking to see what the sixth guest has already eaten, we come up with a quick (and complimentary) midcourse—a small soup or salad—for him or her to enjoy while we remake and replate the missing dish.
THE FIVE A’S FOR EFFECTIVELY ADDRESSING MISTAKES
Awareness—Many mistakes go unaddressed because no one is even aware they have happened. If you’re not aware, you’re nowhere.
Acknowledgement—“Our server had an accident, and we are going to prepare a new plate for you as quickly as possible.” Apology—“I am so sorry this happened to you.” Alibis are not one of the Five A’s. It is not appropriate or useful to make excuses (“We’re short-staffed.”)
Action—“Please enjoy this for now. We’ll have your fresh order out in just a few minutes.” Say what you are going to do to make amends then follow through.
Additional generosity—Unless the mistake had to do with slow timing, I would instruct my staff to send out something additional (a complimentary dessert or dessert wine) to thank the guests for having been good
sports. Some more serious mistakes warrant a complimentary dish or meal.
Unless something truly grave has occurred (food poisoning, someone slipping in a pool of olive oil), it’s sometimes helpful, when appropriate, to inject a little humor into the “great last chapter.” I was at Eleven Madison Park during lunch one day when the former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a regular at our restaurants since becoming president of the New School, came in. When he greeted me, he asked, “Did you hear what happened last night at Gramercy Tavern? We had a dinner party in your private dining room.”
I had not heard about it, and that embarrassed me. I should have been given a heads-up by my staff.
“So how was it?” I asked
“Well, it was good except for the beetle in my friend’s salad,” he said.
“Oh, my God. I feel horrible,” I said. “I apologize. I hope my team handled it well. Did you bring it to their attention?”
“Oh, yeah,” the senator said. “[The person] was a bit upset, but your people handled it incredibly well.” I walked away, shaking my head. What a business.
After seating Senator Kerrey, I spoke to our manager at Eleven Madison Park. “There was a mistake with a salad last night at Gramercy Tavern. We’ve got to figure out how to write a great last chapter here,” I said. I gave her the background, adding, “Whether or not Senator Kerrey or his guest orders a salad during his lunch, I want you to deliver a beautiful salad and garnish it with a small piece of paper. On
that piece of paper I want you to write the word RINGO, and when you deliver it, you can tell them, ‘Danny wanted to make sure you knew that Gramercy Tavern wasn’t the only one of his restaurants that’s willing to garnish your salad with a beatle.”
Fortunately, the mistake hadn’t been very serious; no one had gotten sick or been hurt. But it was now impossible for Senator Kerrey to tell anyone the story about the beetle in the salad without also mentioning the “last chapter” we wrote the following day.
Most mistakes, like this one, are simple enough to fix. But when we receive complaints of any type, our mission is twofold: first, to learn from the mistake and to profit from what we’ve learned; and second, to write a great last chapter that allows us to end up in a better place with the guest than if we had never made the mistake in the first place.
The time frame for addressing mistakes is crucial. When something goes wrong, it is essential for the manager on whose watch the mistake occurred to make every effort to connect with the guest within twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, we immediately review and analyze our own performance to determine exactly what happened. (When a baseball pitcher hangs a curveball that gets whacked out of the park for a home run, you can bet he reviews the videotapes the next day to avoid making the same mistake again.) No matter how much you may try to erase what’s happened, you cannot. Why wait for a second or third letter from somebody who has now cc’d his report of your fallibility and culpability to the Chamber of Commerce, the restaurant critic of the New York Times, and the Zagat Survey? Instead, take the initiative:
- Respond graciously, and do so at once. You know you’re going to resolve the mistake eventually. It’s always a lot less costly to resolve the matter at the outset.
- Err on the side of generosity. Apologize and make sure the value of the redemption is worth more than the cost of the initial mistake.
- Always write a great last chapter. People love to share stories of adversity. Use this powerful force to your advantage by writing the closing statement the way you want it told. Use all your imagination and creativity in thinking about your response.
- Learn from the mistake. Use every new mistake as a teaching tool with your employees. Unless the mistake involved a lack of integrity, the person who made it has actually helped your team by providing you with new opportunities to improve.
- Make new mistakes every day. Don’t waste time repeating the old ones.
When we do learn about a mishap in one of our restaurants, I always want to hear the staff member’s side of the story before I connect with the guest, since our first responsibility in the culture of enlightened hospitality is to be on the side of our team. If a complaint involves a server’s “bad attitude,” we will find out exactly what took place and then use that knowledge to help the staff member learn from what happened. (Sometimes we learn that guests brought in their own bad attitude. In that case, there’s still an opportunity to learn about how to respond more effectively to a guest’s challenging mood.) If a server repeats the same mistakes—a second or third spill, a pattern of complaints about his or her attitude—then we
may need to address that person’s overall ability to excel or comply with our priorities.
SOMETIMES IT IS OUR job to go the extra mile for guests to solve problems not of our making. One day at Tabla a woman walked in for lunch and realized that she had left her wallet in the taxi. A summer intern from Cornell was working at the front desk that day and did his best to comfort the shaken woman, reassuring her that we’d of course extend her credit, and urging her to relax and enjoy lunch. That was good, but I thought we could do even better. I got Tabla’s general manager, Randy Garutti, involved. “Randy,” I said, “this woman is going to tell the whole world that she left her wallet in a taxi while she was on her way to Tabla. I know we can create a legend out of this somehow.”
I didn’t give Randy a script to follow. But he knew exactly what I meant by creating a legend. He spoke to the woman and learned that she had also left her cell phone in the cab. He immediately had a staff member start calling her cell phone number. Meanwhile, the woman was seated, her friend arrived, and they ordered lunch. After half an hour of persistent redials, a man’s voice finally answered her phone. It was the taxi driver, who was by now way up in the Bronx. He confirmed that he had the wallet in his car too.
Unbeknownst to the woman, we sent a staff member uptown to meet the driver and retrieve the wallet and cell phone, both of which were in her hands before the check for lunch was on the table. She was amazed and obviously delighted. We had turned a nightmare into a legend of hospitality. Our round-trip taxi ride had cost $31. I’d be surprised if the woman hasn’t already given Tabla 100 times that value in positive word-of-mouth.
One night a few years ago at Eleven Madison Park, a couple came in to celebrate their anniversary with us. Our maître d’ congratulated them and offered them each a complimentary glass of champagne. They were quite pleased. Then the man asked, “Do you know much about wine?”
“I know a lot about our wine list,” the maître d’ said. “Do you need some help selecting a great wine for your dinner?”
“No,” the man said, “I have a technical question. We have a very special bottle of champagne at home to celebrate with after dinner. But the bottle was warm, so before we came here tonight I put it in the freezer. Is that bottle going to explode?”
“Yes, it’s going to explode,” the maître d’ said. The man stood up in a panic and said to his wife, “Oh, my God, honey, I’ve got to go home and deal with this before that bottle explodes.”
The maître d’ saw a great last chapter taking shape. “Listen,” he said, “you’re here for your anniversary, and we want you to have a great night. If you’ll give me your address, I’ll gladly go over to your apartment and take the champagne out of the freezer.”
“All right, you’re on,” the man said. He called to alert his doorman, and our maître d’ took a cab to their address where he transferred the champagne from the freezer to the refrigerator. And next to the bottle, he set some dessert chocolates from the restaurant and a small tin of caviar along with a note that read, “Happy Anniversary from Eleven Madison Park.” These folks became dedicated regulars.
In handling mistakes, our goal is always to alter course to create a positive outcome and an experience that ends up being memorable for the right reasons. Sometimes that has required an athletic effort—literally and figuratively. One night when we’d closed Tabla for a private party, a couple walked in for dinner. “What do you mean, you’re closed?” the man asked Richard Coraine, who was then acting as Tabla’s general manager. “Then why did one of your people take our reservation for tonight?” To make matters much worse, they had driven 250 miles from New Hampshire just to eat at Tabla. Richard was in a tough spot. Obviously, he couldn’t seat them. Frustrated and angry, the couple stormed out and headed uptown along Madison Avenue.
For one very long minute, Richard and his maître d’ sat mortified and wondered what they should do. Suddenly, they had a solution. They bolted out of the restaurant and sprinted up Madison Avenue, catching up with the couple a few blocks away. “We’re so sorry about the situation at Tabla,” Richard told them. “We want you to come back soon.” He gave them a gift certificate for a future dinner at Tabla. He next called Gramercy Tavern on his cell phone to make sure there was a table available immediately, and he offered to buy them their dinner that night. They accepted, and the maître d’ walked them to the restaurant on East Twentieth Street and made sure that they would be very well cared for.
Later Richard handwrote them a note in which he reiterated his apology. The couple kept up a correspondence with him and eventually became regulars at Tabla, making the 500 mile round-trip nearly every month for dinner.
We’re most interested in developing a good relationship that results from the way people feel about how we’ve overcome a mistake. Just before lunch on a sweltering
summer day, the air compressor at Eleven Madison Park broke down. More than 100 people had reservations. The ambient temperature was in the mid-eighties and rising as noon approached. For one of our managers, this crisis became an opportunity to write a great last chapter.
First, he ran out and bought two oscillating fans for the two per-spiring reservationists, who were stuck in a small, hot office fielding calls. He instinctively understood that it was crucial for the people on our front line in offering hospitality to remain comfortable while they were taking care of callers seeking reservations two and three weeks ahead. Next, he went to a nearby Woolworth’s and purchased every small battery-operated mini-fan in the store’s entire inventory.
On entering the sauna (aka Eleven Madison Park), each guest received not just a deep apology about our air- conditioning failure, but a gift of one of the fans. The mood in the dining room was actually festive, not hostile. New Yorkers often take adversity and crises in stride, and the guests that day seemed to be enjoying the novelty of the tiny fans on each table.
One of the most challenging days of my professional life was the result of another heat wave. It was April 2002, just a few weeks after Blue Smoke opened, and because the temperature was freakishly high for spring—in the high nineties—we had a brownout in the restaurant. I was out of New York on business when I got a cell phone call with the news that our electrical system had failed. Both Blue Smoke and Jazz Standard were completely booked and scheduled to open in half an hour.
Between the restaurant and the jazz club, we had taken some 500 reservations that we were now unable to honor. I
called my senior management team and instructed them to reach (or leave messages for) as many as possible of the people who had made reservations. We needed to let them know that because of our brownout we couldn’t open that night, but also to assure them that we would gladly rearrange dinner at their convenience.
We decided that every guest who did show up—and nearly 200 did—would receive not only an apology but also a Blue Smoke to-go bag filled with barbecue sauce, Magic Dust seasoning, and a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant. We also made reservations for the guests, wherever they chose to dine that evening. We sent seventy-five people to Eleven Madison Park and bought their dinners. (That we went so far overboard with our apology is an apt illustration of how defensive we felt about our performance in those very early days at Blue Smoke.)
Eventually the electricians and engineers jerry-rigged a system to pump just enough air-conditioning into the dining room to let us seat about two dozen hardy guests. Even without kitchen exhaust fans, the staff followed through professionally and fed all those people, a display of remarkable grace under sweltering and smoky pressure.
RUNNING (AND WORKING FOR) a company whose restaurants are known for their hospitality and superior ser vice can sometimes be a double-edged sword. I’ll bet we get at least as many letters of complaint from guests as other restaurants do precisely because we set the bar for excellence so high. The great majority of objections follow the same format: whatever has gone wrong always comes as a “complete letdown” because the guests had arrived
with such high expectations, and we’ve let them down. They’re correct to let us know.
During lunch ser vice one day in 1995, in the very early months at Gramercy Tavern, the hostess of a party of six told her server that she didn’t care for her salmon and asked for something else. A manager on duty was alerted and told the server to leave the salmon on the woman’s bill, since there was nothing wrong with it and she had eaten more than half of it. As the host of a business meeting, she did not contest the bill, understandably wanting to avoid an awkward scene. Then, on her way out, the woman was handed a doggie bag containing the uneaten balance of her salmon. There was no confusion; this was done by design.
The guest wrote to me: “I can’t believe how insulting and passive-aggressive that was, and it’s not what I would expect at one of your restaurants.” She was spot on, and I was mortified when I learned what had happened.
This incident led to a pivotal moment in my career. Until then, hospitality had been no more than a personal instinct. I hadn’t articulated to myself what hospitality meant—or, for that matter, what the absence of hospitality meant. How could I possibly have been explicit about it to anyone else?
These were the initial days of my becoming a two-restaurant restaurateur, and for the first nine years of Union Square Cafe’s existence, I had always been on hand to see and fix things as they were happening—demonstrating what to do rather than teaching others how or why to do it. I had never had to codify how particular mistakes or crises should be addressed.
At the weekly management meeting immediately after this incident, it became clear to me that a number of others on our team would have done exactly what the manager did. Why remove the salmon from her bill when it was
perfectly good and she had eaten most if it? Contrary to my belief that you get more by giving more, they were concerned about how to get screwed less by protecting yourself more. That’s a valid model for some people— including many across the entire spectrum of businesses— but it’s one with which I’m completely uncomfortable. I don’t believe that the principle of erring on the side of generosity is inherently superior to the principle of fiercely protecting yourself in order to make as much money as possible. But generosity is the way I choose to do business in my restaurants, and so far it has always contributed mightily to our success.
Are you in it for keeps? It’s almost always worth bearing a higher short-term cost if you want to win in the long run. I’m convinced that you get what you give, and you get more by first giving more.
Generosity of spirit and a gracious approach to problem solving are, with few exceptions, the most effective way I know to earn lasting goodwill for your business.
I realized that a critically important role for me, as the leader of the company, was to define upfront what was nonnegotiable. That way, if employees were not comfortable, they could choose to walk. More than any other previous mistake had done, the incident of the doggie bag taught me that it was more imperative than ever for me to articulate my core values and vision.
Our training has evolved and improved dramatically through the years. I’m quite explicit now in setting the table for our staff. I make it absolutely clear that if guests don’t like something they’ve ordered, it is removed from the check, period. It’s the server’s job to sense that guests are
unhappy before they have to tell you. (As for the manager, we parted ways, as it became increasingly clear that we just saw business differently.)
Though lapses in hospitality, fortunately, don’t happen every day, we have had plenty of other examples from which we’ve been able to learn. In the early days of Tabla, chef Floyd Cardoz felt strongly that he and his staff could never do a superior job of cooking for tables larger than a party of eight. Floyd had come from the old, rigid French school of kitchen management, having been sous-chef for seven years at the very refined Lespinasse.
I understood his fear, though not his position. When a table of eight or two parties of six arrive all at once, their orders can clog up the restaurant’s flow and wreak havoc. Trying to cook for and coordinate the timing of too many large parties can be very challenging. It demands precise alignment among the various stations in the kitchen and the dining room—and meanwhile, ser vice for the smaller tables can grind to a halt.
We managed to get along with Floyd’s party-size limitation until a night when one of our most loyal customers, having made a reservation for eight, arrived with an unexpected ninth guest in tow. Floyd absolutely refused to let the maître d’ seat them, giving the entire party of nine no choice but to leave Tabla.
This shouldn’t have happened to anybody, but it turned out that the host of the party was Fern Mallis, who, while heading the influential Council of Fashion Designers of America for more than a decade, conducted the “Seventh on Sixth” fashion shows in Bryant Park and was a friend and a frequent guest at our restaurants. Fern was disappointed and justifiably furious.
When I heard about this, I immediately met with Floyd. My message was stern and clear: Policies are nothing more than guidelines to be broken for the benefit of our guests. We’re here to give the guests what they want, period. Floyd was initially stubborn in arguing his point; but to his credit, he listened, understood the impact his inhospitable reaction had made on our guests, and changed his approach dramatically. Tabla has since found ways to seat parties of nine, ten, twelve, and even sixteen without compromising quality; and Floyd’s adaptivity has been an important source of hospitality and profitability for the restaurant. Still, it’s a shame that a loyal guest was offended before we learned the lesson that took our restaurant to a much better place than before.
As for Fern, I acknowledged, apologized, and acted on our mistake. “I am embarrassed and I feel terrible,” I told her. “We absolutely made the wrong decision, and I’d hate for you to never come back as a result of that one incident. Next time, it’s my treat.” I wouldn’t blame anyone who had received that kind of non-welcome for choosing to never return.
An even worse kind of mistake is one that involves a lapse in character—theft, deception, or disrespect. In the fall of 2000, in an article in Gourmet magazine, an unnamed maître d’ at Union Square Cafe was alleged to have accepted a $50 bribe (palmed in a handshake) from a walk- in guest who had just been told there were no tables available without a reservation. The guest was actually the reporter, who had gone undercover at a number of top restaurants to learn at which ones a table might be bought.
Reading the piece was deeply disturbing to me. Union Square Cafe had been publicly humiliated, and we had no idea who on our team had been involved. It put us in a
position where we had to ask our entire front-door staff if this could be true (no one confessed), and the questioning alone hurt the team’s morale. I refused to go on a witch hunt. Instead, I wanted to turn the incident into a group learning experience. I wasted no time writing a great last chapter: in this case, an actual letter to the editor, which was published in the next issue of Gourmet. Despite what I called Gourmet’s “successful sting operation,” I wrote: “[It] is absolutely against the policy of Union Square Cafe for anyone on our staff to accept a tip as an inducement to provide a last-minute table. We are deeply embarrassed that one member of our staff violated our standards…and, above all, apologize to the hundreds of thousands of Union Square Cafe patrons who have made their reservations the fair way throughout the 15 years we’ve been in business.” The story had a very happy ending when I got to know the author of the article, Bruce Feiler. He ended up featuring Union Square Cafe in another article in Gourmet, for which he infiltrated the ranks of our staff to understand the secret behind the restaurant’s “hospitality culture.” He won a James Beard Award for that piece. Not a bad last chapter.
I find it enormously instructive to observe how other companies handle their mistakes. I was in Bloomingdale’s department store on the Upper East Side to stock our home kitchen, and I bought several items, including an electric hand mixer. Several weeks went by before my wife needed the mixer to make a cake. When she opened the box for the first time, she found that there were no blades inside.
Audrey didn’t get around to bringing the mixer back to Bloomingdale’s until several months later, after the kids were back in school. When she found a saleswoman in the housewares department, she opened the box and began explaining: “I feel so bad, I was out of town for the summer,
I can’t find the receipt, and this is the first chance I’ve had to come back…”
The woman interrupted Audrey with one of the greatest hospitality responses I’ve ever heard. “Say no more! You didn’t even have to bring the box in. You could have just called. Now let me get two replacement blades for you right away.”
Audrey was so impressed that she ended up buying five more things in housewares—and Bloomingdale’s ended up in a much better place with her than if those blades had come with the mixer in the first place. The story gets even better. When the sales clerk saw Audrey eyeing a set of barbecue tongs and spatula for the pit, she said, “That’s on sale today. Do you have one of our coupons?” Audrey said no. “Too bad,” the saleswoman said. “It’s thirty percent off today. Hold on—I’m going to go find you a coupon in the back office.” On her way there, she stopped to pull the two mixer blades from the demo model on the floor, and then returned with the coupons.
Say no more! There’s always a solution if you’re open to finding one.
Another example of a company that knows how to overcome a mistake is JetBlue. Not long after the airline had started up, Richard Coraine booked a flight to Florida to visit his parents. The day before he was to depart, he received a phone call and an e-mail asking him to call JetBlue immediately. First, the airline confirmed his reservation.
Then, it admitted making a mistake. “We overbooked that flight,” the agent told him. She gave Richard a choice: travel the next day as planned, or give up his seat on that flight in exchange for a later trip, free, to Palm Beach.
Typically, most airlines don’t address their overbookings until just before, or sometimes even after, everyone has boarded the plane. This was the first time, Richard said, that an airline had ever reached out twenty-four hours ahead of time to give him such a choice. Richard chose to give up his seat, got a free trip, and had hardly any disruption of his plans: he was able to depart just two hours after his original flight.
Bloomingdale’s and JetBlue, their five A’s soundly in place, wrote great last chapters with Audrey and Richard, and won loyal customers and enthusiastic apostles for their businesses. Richard’s experience also helped encourage our company to want to build a strong business relationship with JetBlue. The airline now sponsors our Big Apple Barbecue Block Party as well as our annual Autumn Harvest dinner and auction at Eleven Madison Park to benefit the hunger relief organization Share Our Strength.
Stanley Marcus was absolutely right. By viewing mistakes as opportunities to repair and strengthen relationships, rather than letting them destroy relationships, a business is paving its own road to success and good fortune. And mistakes are the best form of job security I know of. Just as with waves in the ocean, you can bet your bottom dollar that there’s always another mistake behind the one you’re confronting at any time. So long as you’re determined to distinguish yourself and your company by how well you approach mistakes, you’ll always have steady work.
