Hospitalitech

When I was in sixth grade, I discovered I had a gift.

Spelling bees. Classroom, grade, school district. First place, three years running. Twice I made it to Seattle for the Washington State spelling bee, standing at a microphone in front of a room full of people, spelling words that look like you grabbed a handful of random Scrabble tiles.

My preparation was exhausting. Every evening my mother would drill me on words for an hour. Tens of thousands of reps to train my brain to recite each letter with focus and clarity. But my visualization method was simple and a little strange. When I practiced a difficult word, I would picture it in my mind against a specific background. Yellow. With black letters. I’m not a fan of bees, so I don’t know where the visual came from. I just know it worked.

I stuck that childhood memory somewhere in the back of my mind and didn’t think about it again for roughly thirty years.

Simon Sinek has been in my professional orbit for a long time. Start With Why was introduced to me the way the right books should be, not as new information but as recognition. He named the programming code that was already running underneath my work. He gave me language for the reason I did what I did long before I could have articulated it myself. When Sinek speaks, I listen. When Sinek publishes, I pay attention.

So when I was browsing his website one afternoon and saw a book listed under his Optimism Press webpage: bright yellow cover, black lettering, my hand moved to the purchase button before my brain finished forming the thought.

The title was Unreasonable Hospitality. The author was Will Guidara.

Something in my nervous system recognized those colors before I read a single word.

Reading this book was a different experience than other business, productivity, or personal development books.

It wasn’t a gradual awakening. It wasn’t a growing realization that accumulated over chapters. It was a neck pop. The kind where you turn your head to one side and something releases that has been tight for longer than you realized, and the sound it makes is loud enough to startle you. But afterward everything feels different.

Guidara built Eleven Madison Park into the best restaurant in the world not by having the best food, though the food was extraordinary, but by treating every guest as someone whose experience deserved unreasonable attention, unreasonable care, unreasonable investment. His staff didn’t just serve people. They noticed each person. They made those dining in a beautiful restaurant feel that the entire operation existed for them specifically, at that table, on that evening.

I read that and I said to myself: I know this place! I have been working here for thirty years.

I filled thirty-seven pages of a Leuchtturm 1917 notebook with takeaways, memorable quotes, and a-ha realizations as Guidara’s world and mine kept colliding page after every turned page. Statements about the guest that mapped perfectly onto statements about the faculty member. Principles about the dining room that applied with uncomfortable precision to the university help desk. A philosophy built in a restaurant on Madison Avenue that had somehow also been built, quietly and without a name, in a Canvas LMS administrator’s office in Bellingham, Washington.

I had been practicing Hospitalitech without knowing it had a name.

You read that right. Hospitalitech is my term for what happens when fine-dining hospitality standards are applied deliberately and without apology to technology support. It is the belief that the person on the other end of the support email deserves the same quality of attention, the same anticipation of need, the same unreasonable investment in their experience that Guidara’s team brought to every table at Eleven Madison Park.

Hospitalitech isn’t a software as a service framework. It’s not a soft skills training module. It is a philosophy that says the client sitting across from you, metaphorically or literally, is the point of the entire operation. It’s not about the trouble ticket, the managerial metric or the quarterly report. It’s about them.

Guidara gave me the zip ties to bind his work with mine. Sinek had already given me the why underneath both.

I’ve been doing something other people in IT are not doing. The evidence is in the responses I receive. The faculty member who says “I had no idea it could be this easy,” the staff colleagues who feel genuinely seen because someone took two minutes to notice their good work and tell their supervisor about it. That unique something has been working. Because it is different.

What I didn’t have, until a bright yellow book with black letters arrived from Simon Sinek’s publishing imprint, was the word for it.

I pictured words in yellow and black when I was twelve years old and won spelling bees. I recognized a book in yellow and black when I was in my late forties and found the vocabulary for thirty years of professional practice.

Some things take a while to come full circle. When they do, they make a sound like pow or bang or thwack. That’s onomatopoeia for a meaningful discovery.

More later...