“I want to get rid of this notion that nice guys have to finish last. I think that nice people want to work in every kind of business.” – Danny Meyer – Restaurateur
Competitive environments often reward speed, bargaining power and the willingness to impose costs on others. That makes warmth appear commercially naive, particularly in sectors where margins are narrow and customers can switch easily. Yet the more durable advantage may come from making cooperation reliable. Employees share information more freely, customers return with greater confidence and suppliers become more willing to solve problems when they believe a business is acting in good faith. Kindness, properly understood, is not surrender. It is a disciplined way of building relationships that improve the quality and resilience of commercial decisions.
Danny Meyer developed this argument through restaurants, where the product is unusually exposed to human behaviour. A meal can be technically excellent and still fail if the welcome is cold, the response to a mistake is defensive or the staff appear disconnected from one another. His operating philosophy, commonly described as enlightened hospitality, places employees before guests, followed by the community, suppliers and investors.1,3 The ordering is deliberately provocative: it treats financial returns as an outcome of a healthy system rather than the sole instruction given to that system.
The logic is straightforward. Employees who feel respected are more likely to notice detail, take responsibility and protect the experience when conditions become difficult. Those behaviours create value that cannot be reduced to a script. Meyer distinguishes service, which is the technical delivery of a product, from hospitality, which concerns how that delivery makes a person feel.6 The distinction applies well beyond restaurants. In professional services, retail, healthcare and software, customers often remember whether an organisation listened, adapted and took ownership long after they have forgotten the precise features of what they bought.
Kindness is not the same as weakness
The language of nice people can create a problem because niceness is often confused with conflict avoidance. A leader who never challenges poor performance, negotiates badly or tolerates harmful conduct is not practising enlightened hospitality. That leader is transferring the cost of their passivity to colleagues and customers. Effective kindness requires boundaries, standards and the courage to deliver unwelcome information without humiliation. It asks how a decision affects people, not whether every person can be pleased by it.
Research on teamwork supports this more exact interpretation. A study discussed by London Business School found that teams with higher average agreeableness performed better on tasks involving uncertainty, where collaboration and the exchange of perspectives mattered.8 Agreeableness in that context did not mean automatic compliance. It meant a greater inclination to cooperate, listen and maintain productive relationships while solving a problem. The commercial lesson is significant: when circumstances change quickly, a culture that enables candour and mutual support may outperform one that relies on internal rivalry.
Restaurants make this visible because every shift contains uncertainty. Bookings change, ingredients arrive late, equipment fails and customers bring different expectations. A rigid hierarchy can preserve the appearance of control while slowing the response. A trusted team can improvise within clear principles. Meyer has described hiring for emotional qualities such as curiosity, optimism, empathy, work ethic and judgement alongside technical competence.6,7 The point is not to replace skill with charm. It is to select people capable of using skill in a social environment where the quality of the interaction affects the value of the product.
The competitive mechanism
Hospitality becomes a competitive strategy when it produces repeatable advantages. A generous response to an error can recover trust. A manager who protects staff from needless abuse can reduce exhaustion and turnover. A company that treats suppliers as partners may receive earlier warnings about shortages or more creative solutions during disruption. These effects are difficult to measure in a single transaction, but they accumulate through reputation, retention and learning. The business is not being kind instead of competing; it is competing through a system that makes trust economically useful.
That system still needs discipline. Generosity has a cost, and the cost must be allocated deliberately rather than disguised as virtue. A free replacement, flexible cancellation or extra training session makes sense when it protects a valuable relationship or corrects an organisational failure. It becomes destructive when customers learn that unreasonable demands receive better treatment than reasonable ones, or when employees are expected to absorb emotional labour without support. The strongest version of Meyer’s philosophy therefore combines warmth with operational clarity, accountability and a willingness to say no.
The approach also changes the meaning of winning. Traditional business rhetoric often presents victory as the result of being tougher than competitors, extracting more from suppliers or keeping employees under pressure. A hospitality-led model defines victory as building an organisation that customers choose, employees want to improve and investors can trust over time. That definition does not remove rivalry. Meyer has explicitly rejected the assumption that hospitality implies a lack of competitiveness and has described winning as compatible with his values.4 The contrast is between aggressive purpose and destructive conduct, not between ambition and decency.
Limits and unresolved tensions
There are real objections. Employee-first language can become branding if wages, scheduling, progression and workplace safety do not match it. Hospitality businesses also depend on workers who perform substantial emotional labour, and asking them to remain endlessly positive can conceal stress rather than solve it. Criticism of Meyer’s framework has noted the danger of treating selfless care as a personal disposition while leaving structural weaknesses untouched.10 A culture cannot be repaired by hiring cheerful people if the workload, incentives or management practices make good performance unsustainable.
Scale presents another challenge. A small restaurant can remember regular customers and empower staff with local knowledge. A large chain must translate values into recruitment, training, technology and performance systems. If those systems reward only speed or short-term sales, the language of hospitality will lose credibility. If they create excessive scripts, employees may perform friendliness without exercising judgement. The practical task is to turn principles into behaviours that can be taught, observed and corrected while preserving enough discretion for people to respond to context.
The broader significance lies in treating relationships as part of the operating model rather than as decoration around it. Trust is slow to build and easy to damage, but it can lower friction across nearly every important exchange. It encourages employees to raise problems earlier, customers to give a business another chance and partners to invest in mutual success. Nice people do not necessarily finish last. Businesses that confuse ruthlessness with strength may win isolated contests while weakening the network on which their future depends. The more durable form of competition is the ability to be demanding about standards while remaining generous about people.
References
1. Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in … – 2006-10-03 – https://www.amazon.sg/Setting-Table-Transforming-Hospitality-Business/dp/0060742755
2. What Danny Meyer Wants Future Restaurateurs To Know – 2026-09-30 – https://cherrybombe.substack.com/p/danny-meyer-does-not-want-to-give
3. [PDF] Setting the Table – https://blas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Setting-the-Table-by-Danny-Meyer.pdf
4. Lessons from Shake Shack Founder Danny Meyer, with a … – 2023-02-27 – https://globalyouth.wharton.upenn.edu/articles/entrepreneurs-leaders/lessons-from-shake-shack-founder-danny-meyer-with-a-side-of-fries/
5. Setting the Table – Miami University Online Bookstore – eCampus.com – 2010-02-02 – https://miamioh.ecampus.com/setting-table-meyer-danny/bk/9780060742751
6. Danny Meyer at The Commonwealth Club – 2006-10-21 – https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/431/danny-meyer-at-the-commonwealth-club
7. www.supersummary.com · setting-the-tableSetting the Table Summary | SuperSummary – 2026-05-11 – https://www.supersummary.com/setting-the-table/summary/
8. Why kindness is a competitive advantage – 2026-08-21 – https://www.london.edu/think/kill-chaos-with-kindness-why-agreeableness-pays
9. Leadership Development and Analysis – https://www.leadershipnow.com/leadershop/0060742755.html
10. It Is Time To Rethink Danny Meyer’s ‘Setting the Table’ – Food & Wine – 2021-05-28 – https://www.foodandwine.com/fwpro/rethinking-danny-meyers-setting-the-table
