My summer reading has included, amongst oodles of tartan noir crime fiction, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. It was penned by restauranteur Will Guidara of Eleven Madison Park fame.

It’s a story of riches to riches, and one that could do with a good edit.

If you’ve ever worked in hospitality in a ‘good place’ (and it’s something I think every senior leader should have done, or do, at some point in their career) you’ll recognise many of the tactics and strategies for running an insanely good restaurant.

There are moments of genuine storytelling magic, which viewers of The Bear Season 3 will recognise.

He introduces concepts like the “95/5 Rule,” where 95% of the budget is managed to the bone in order to create 5% of wildly creative indulgences. The “One-Inch Rule”, referring to the distance between plate and cutlery and edge of table, has a wider significance in underscoring the important of intentionality in every action, no matter how small it may seem.

He talks about the eleven core values they have. Eleven. Why eleven? To match their address, of course. And, no: I cannot remember them.

Most of the book is given over to countless examples of these imperatives. Do this. Don’t do that. Do more of this. Never do this. Behave like that. Be like this.

And it’s all wrapped up in cult-like language that makes it inaccessible to people outside the circle (DBC, if you’re not in agreement with what I’m saying, folks.)

There are maybe 40 or more key rules to follow, points stretched over a few hundred pages. Most review sites manage to spot just five key ideas.

Guidara could have saved himself the trouble, perhaps, because his north star, key core value, vision, mission statement and raison d’être is in the title of the book:

Give people more than they expect.

Full. Stop.

No doubt this New York Times bestseller has been a revelation to the hundreds of thousands who’ve read it. His success is undeniable.

But the hard work for every reader is doing the following: whether you take 40 or four ideas from the book, or just go by the title without moving beyond page one, you still have to translate this into what it means for you.

Filling in the gaps with his own anecdotes, life story and rules doesn’t make that work any easier.

The more language we introduce to one big idea, the more chance there is that it is misinterpreted (as, indeed, Guidara found to his cost when he forgot his own key rule midway through the restaurant’s development).

Sure, Guidara’s been able to create a bestseller by filling out that one sentence into a few hundred pages.

We feel that pressure to create lots of content, too, when we write core values or mission statements.

160 hours of work might need to be justified by only a dozen words or one page of strategy. It takes guts to show up with twelve words when you’ve worked so hard (and they’ve spent the money).

Most people don’t strip things away. They add too much. And they all end up looking the same, as my colleague Chantelle remarked a couple of weeks ago in this newsletter.

When you commit to writing what really matters to you, it can be very little, and yet be enough to serve every decision you and your team are going to take from that point onwards.

My colleague Brad puts it this way: you can have one policy to rule them all, because the more policies you have the less likely people are going to know what’s in them.