Will Guidara

Will Guidara is the restaurateur behind Eleven Madison Park, the New York restaurant he ran with chef Daniel Humm and which was named the best restaurant in the world in 2017. He is the author of Unreasonable Hospitality, a New York Times bestseller that turned the argument behind that run into a business book read well outside the restaurant industry.

His central claim is that hospitality and service are not the same thing. Service is the delivery of what was promised, and it can be systematised. Hospitality is how that delivery makes a person feel, and it depends on giving staff the authority and the budget to do something unscripted for the person in front of them. The book's most repeated story, a hot dog bought from a street cart and served at a table with four-star plating, is an illustration of that principle rather than a gimmick.

That distinction is why his material travels. Most organizations have already invested in service: the process, the SLA, the script. Very few have decided who is allowed to depart from it, and under what conditions. Guidara's sessions are usually booked at the point where a company has good operational metrics and a customer base that still feels nothing in particular.

He is the host of The Welcome Conference, an annual gathering for the hospitality industry, and a co-producer on the television series The Bear. He is a recipient of the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award and a graduate of Cornell's School of Hotel Administration.

On stage he works through narrative rather than framework, which suits an audience being asked to change a posture rather than adopt a process. Sessions are frequently booked as an opener for leadership meetings where the intent is to reset how a room thinks about its customers before the operational agenda begins.