BostonBlog

Last week I ducked out of a storm into a Barnes & Noble here in DC and spent an hour browsing. One book caught my eye on one of the tables and I wound up buying it (though, between my Zooba membership and my acute Amazon addiction it seems I always have more books waiting to be read than I will ever have time to finish). This one was rather entertaining, though, and I finished it in a couple of metro trips.

The book was Kitchen Confidential, and I honestly had no idea until five minutes ago, when I decided I should probably check out the thought leader session lineup at this year's annual meeting, that the book's author, Anthony Bourdain, is speaking at one of them.

This is one I'm not going to miss, as I can't wait to hear more about the management philosophy of the man who wrote:

"I've coddled plenty of dangerously unstable characters over the years; I've kept on plenty of people who I knew in the end would make me look bad and become more trouble than they were worth ... I appreciate people who show up every day and do the best they can, in spite of borderline personalities, substance abuse problems, and antisocial tendencies; and I am often inclined to give them every opportunity to change their trajectories, to help them to arrive at a different outcome than the predictable one when they begin visibly to unravel. But once gone -- quit, fired, or dead -- I move on to the next problem. There always is one."

And also wrote:

"I like to tell selected people things in supposed confidence a few times a week, for fun. Later, when it comes back to me it provides an interesting roadmap of data transfer, a barium meal, revealing who squeals and to whom. There are a number of interesting variations on this practice -- feeding false information to a known loudhmouth, for instance, with a particular target in mind."

This should be a fun one, though I suspect Bourdain may give Jamie Notter apoplexy.