Supervision / In the News

I spun the In the News segment of class in a decidedly pizza direction, talking up articles like the one about the Italian pizza vending machine that actually makes pizza from scratch, and news that a beloved NYC institution recently burned down, but will simply rebrick its oven and carry on. More pointedly, the restaurant where I've been working as manager got a very brief mention in New York magazine. I told the class how I'd brushed this mention off as too minor for noteworthiness...but the day after it hit the newsstands, we had a steady stream of visitors who saw the mention and wanted to know what was up. Publicity, ain't it a bitch! We're not open yet, hope to be soft opened next week, so we'll see.

NY Times had a creepy article about too many cooks in the kitchens -- unemployment is hitting the restaurant sector hard. Richard noted that when there was a slump in the 80s, a lot of Wall Street types found refuge in transferring their skills to food service. Now those refugees are getting the pinch again.

Our friends over in Arizona's Heart Attack Grill are offering unlimited free food every day for anyone over 350 lbs. Nice. God Bless America! But we're not the only scary ones... In Milton Keynes, England, the squirrels there are going nuts for....squirrel-flavor potato chips.

We moved on to supervision, looking at the case study of Bernie, a line cook who got promoted to supervisor then got steamrolled by all this coworkers, because he was too nice and wanted to be their friends at the expense of being their boss. We applied scientific management style (shape up or ship out, fire the evil ones), human relations (sorry you don't like me, how can we help you to be happy?), participatory (what do you want changed and redesigned to help you do the work?) and humanistic (using any style that makes sense to the situation.)

We spoke a bit about the difference between management and leadership. The former is all about organization, the latter is all about inspiring with a vision for the future to be worked towards. Upper management needs to have the leadership thing, the lower level supervision needs to have the management thing. We read through a case study of a new supervisor laying down the law to an established crew, leading to the conclusion: leadership is manipulation.