Most non-fiction authors are familiar with the generic conventions of commercial thought leadership: digestible formats, pithy, accessibly-phrased key takeaways, and snappy, attention grabbing titles.
The genre is so ubiquitous that it is synonymous with quality: the highest converting blog posts, content, and books all follow it, and most non-fiction readers expect to see it on the page. It’s a genre designed to drive views, clicks, downloads, and purchases - that's why I call it commercial. And it operates under the assumption that readers are skimming your content, rather than immersing themselves in it. It assumes an economics of attention that is fast and fleeting, that doesn't have the time, or the luxury, to sit and linger.
This is not to judge this genre, but simply to describe it; commercial thought leadership has arisen in a media ecosystem where attention does often operate in these ways, and it is designed to maximize visibility within that ecosystem. Conversion is king in a commercial genre, and we don't need to apologize for that.
But I so wish this genre hadn't been shoehorned into Will Guidara’s otherwise fascinating memoir, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect.
Simply put, choosing to package this book in such a way as to make it "applicable to business-to-consumer companies as they are business-to-business companies," or, really organization at all, as Simon Sinek's introduction states, directly undermines the ingenuity of the ideas therein (ix). And there’s a lesson in that for us: thought leaders and their editors need to question what rhythms, forms, and genres truly move and inspire action - and we need to be more innovative with this genre in particular.
Let me explain.
There is a dissonance (and accidental irony) between the form and content of Unreasonable Hospitality: while arguing for unreasonable innovation in service of experience, the book follows an entirely conventional format that doesn't make readers feel particularly welcome. This book is about building the most beautiful, outrageously thoughtful and welcoming experiences for customers, clients, and visitors – and it needs to rhetorically perform the ideas it asserts.
Guidara’s editors didn’t help him get it right.
On the one hand, it's pretty clear that neither Guidara nor his book team engaged much with the huge body of literature on business management out there today; there are HBR and McKinsey articles, not to mention academic and trade publications, written on most of Guidara's key takeaways (and using similar terms). It is hard to lead an audience of readers without a strategically differentiating your argument within the topical marketplace - and failing to do so easily alienates readers too. Take, for example, this assertion in the book’s opening pages:
Unfortunately, these skills have never been less valued than they are in our current hyperrational, hyperefficient work culture. We are in the middle of a digital transformation. That transformation has enhanced many aspects of our lives, but too many companies have left the human behind. They’ve been so focused on products, they’ve forgotten about people. And while it may be impossible to quantify in financial terms the impact of making someone feel good, don’t think for a second that it doesn’t matter. In fact, it matters more (6).
I know quite a few product professionals, folks who are building incredible human-centered digital products and experiences, that would fundamentally disagree with this broad stroke. Customer-centric thinking is at the heart of good product design, and it’s not a new concept. And services and products need not compete in their ability to serve people well (although that is another topic, for another time). The point, here, is that it's very clear that this book hasn't been thoughtfully situated for a business readership, Sinek's introductory note not withstanding.
All that aside, the book's bigger problem is its format. The editorial team has taken what's unique, even unreasonable, about Guidara's narrative and homogenized it for a readership already saturated in this form, content, and language. The result is a book that flits along from prosaic statement to prosaic statement, and leaving the most provacative, unreasonable insights unexplored.
Take a look at Chapter 11, “Pushing Towards Excellence." Guidara’s memoir-based material here is rich and lively, bordering on delight and surprise. But the chapter design favors breadth, not depth, and it doesn’t allow the author to explore the bold, counterintuitive statements beyond an initial utterance. A spare 12 pages, it is broken up into no less than 6 discrete sections, subtitled with the following key takeaways:
Why, in a chapter about outrageous excellence, did the editors choose to guide the reader’s journey with phrases so trite as to be meaningless? We have all heard almost all of these phrases in the context of workplace management repeatedly. Where is the texture? The friction? The challenge? The innovation? The invitation?
It’s not just that these catchphrases are clichéd - it’s also that they have little, if anything, to do with the content of the section - and, thus, they obscure the author’s best ideas. To see what I mean, take a look at the middle of Chapter 10. Here, Guidara describes the hiring requirements that led to his award-winning beverage programs. Guidara makes this provocative statement,
[W]hile many who stepped up happened to be knowledgeable about the area they’d chosen, they didn’t need to start out an expert. All we asked was that they be interested and curious and have the first inklings of a passion. (109)
It’s the final words of a section subtitled “Find the Win/Win/Win” – a phrase so aggressively corporate I can barely breathe. More to the point, this title doesn’t capture the truly arresting proposition Guidara proposes here: what if companies hired based on passion and interest, first, and then provided those passionate, interested, curious people with everything they needed to do their jobs sustainably and well?
Think about it, for a moment: What would hiring for passion and interest look like for your business? For your industry? How could you experiment strategically with hiring for passion? Where do the limitations of hiring for passion reside - and in what instances might you be able to put it to the test?
Here’s the question it prompted for me: could the mainstream adoption of this idea across industries shift the value of traditional “passion” roles – like teaching, social work, healthcare, and the arts - to better compensate these professionals for the value they provide? How many more incredible educational, social support, healthcare, and arts experiences would we all enjoy if the people delivering them were paid commensurate with the excellence and passion they bring to the table?
That’s a truly exciting, paradigm-shifting idea, one that gets to the heart of this book's thesis -- that service work is noble, and we are all working in service to others. It's worthy of at least a precisely-phrased subtitle.
Moreover, it's a true insight: a new, even sudden, evidence-backed idea that alters how we think about a problem or opportunity. It surprises. It delights. It inspires further thought and action. It is, at its core, unreasonable.
But this section concludes here, just as things get provocative. And readers are shuttled along to another short section headlined by platitudes, and briskly passing over phrases and clauses that could, if we could just stop to linger with them, could become unreasonable too.
Many such moments in Unreasonable Hospitality left me craving more. The pace of the chapters never relents, moving me along just as I found myself wanting to revel in a fascinating idea, a strong turn of phrase. My reading experience began to feel akin to a dining experience where servers are so prompt, so efficient, so audaciously checking in, that I feel rushed through my meal, my dinner conversation, and finally, out the door. By the half way point, I didn’t end up feeling particularly wowed, nor particularly welcome, and I put it aside.
For all its faults, there is a reason why Unreasonable Hospitality is getting largely positive reviews. It’s a treat, still, to hear insider stories from the world of food. It’s a wonderful reminder that thought leaders can emerge from within many industries, and their knowledge can cross those boundaries to enrich everyone’s work and life. Guidara asserts himself with confidence and has the experience to back it up, and his voice on the page is often bold, unapologetic, and a little bit wicked – all things we like in a great thought leader. And there are real moments of counterintuitive, beautifully articulated innovation that surprised and delighted me - and I savored those bites of brilliance. (My favorite: a great story about serving water, of all things, on page 129).
But this book fails so spectacularly at making me feel welcome that I was left asking: Can this commercial genre, designed for conversion, actually be capable of hospitality? Thought leadership most certainly needs to be welcoming, because its primary goal is to build a coalition, to create a movement. How can it do so, when the bottom line is so transparently behind the experience itself?
Complicating matters further is the idea that hospitality is never neutral: it can be welcoming and threatening, freeing and controlling, validating and challenging, all at once. Unreasonable Hospitality embodies this duplicity, and encourages us to consider how we can innovate the genre of commercial thought leadership to create reading experiences that truly challenge, motivate, and welcome readers.
What does this ratio look like, and how can we get it right?
I think our best bet is to start experimenting with forms, styles, genres, and methods of circulation that hold true to our unreasonable ideas, frameworks, rhetorics, and questions.
For example, I think I would have loved this book as an off-kilter memoir: its narrative is beautifully plotted, often moving, and features some of the food world’s most well-known names alongside characters whose influence is outsized, but whom we would never otherwise come to know. Moreover, I think Guidara’s business sense would have sparkled brighter in a memoir, where his focus isn't so squarely on delivering talking points, but on spinning an enchanting story. There is a strong appetite for memoir within business audiences, too - these are savvy, curious readers who don't necessarily need, or want, a book that puts every teaching point in simplest terms.
We don’t need to let go of what works in commercial thought leadership to find the right ratio - but Unreasonable Hospitality shows that there is room to make it a more interesting, provocative, inviting, and unreasonable genre too.
On the Wing Reviews dig into the details of thought leadership today - the forms, styles, genres, and media that help our thoughts take flight. If you have a hot take to share or title to suggest for review, email us at kate@fledglingeditorial.com.