The restaurant business is simple. Simple is hard.The restaurant business is simple. Simple is hard.

Jim Sullivan is a popular keynote speaker at leadership, franchisee and GM conferences worldwide. This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of Nation’s Restaurant News.

The foodservice industry is characterized by speed, urgency, flash and motion.

We have fast-food and quick-service segments. Food orders are “fired,” and no one leads a restaurant -- they run it. While proverbs warn that “haste makes waste,” we’ve been accepting of both the inefficiencies we tolerate and the leftovers we generate (in both people and portions) as long as the industry moves forward.

The foodservice industry and the unit managers that drive it are as close to a perpetual motion machine as science could ever devise. But ...