The Little Chef Change Experiment

I don’t know if you have been watching the Channel 4 programme, ‘Big Chef takes on Little Chef’.  Heston Blumenthal, the 3 star Michelin chef, went into one of the most run down of our bits of national food heritage, Little Chef to see if he could revitalise it.  He looked at what they prepared, how they prepared it, and the environment in which they operated.

I didn’t necessarily buy into all his methods or ideas but the there was no doubt that not only did Little Chef need to be much better but the motoring public deserved much better too.  The thing which interested me was the reaction of the staff.  Initially they were sceptical, some were openly hostile to the new ideas, then they were scared they couldn’t do it.  When the big unveiling came they felt incredibly proud and excited.  This was an experiment in running a more successful restaurant, so it needed to make money as well as serve better food, and when they feared the bosses might not carry on with it, they then began to wonder if they could go back to the tired old ways.  The thing was the experience had changed them too: it changed how they saw themselves, their attitude to their own sense of value and their dreams of the future. 

That is the the thing about Change, you can never really go back!

“I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then”   Lewis Carroll

“I wanna go back
And do it all over
But I can’t go back, I know
I wanna go back
Cause I’m feeling so much older”  I Wanna Go Back – Eddie Money

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Tags: Change, dreams, vision

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 08:00 and is filed under Business Change, Leadership, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.