The pursuit of perfection is the daily orientation of a leader and a team toward a standard they do not expect to reach, held through consistency at scale, the senior person's inspection at the threshold and a refusal to call good enough good. It treats perfection as a direction the work moves in rather than a state it arrives at.
Nearly every chef I interviewed told me, without prompting, that the perfect dish does not exist, and every one of them described a working life organized around chasing it anyway. The phrase that resolves the contradiction came from Ana Roš of Hiša Franko in Kobarid, Slovenia, who told me that she dreams about perfection and is always on the hunt, and would curse the day she found it, because that would be the day she had to stop cooking.
“Imperfection is the engine for evolution.” Ana Roš, chef and owner, Hiša Franko
The pursuit has a concrete shape in a kitchen. Eric Ripert told me that one idea for stuffed calamari took him twenty years to make exactly the way he wanted it. Le Bernardin names consistency as its greatest challenge: several hundred plates a service, each landing at the standard of the first plate of the night, whatever the brigade’s fatigue at hour eleven. In a hotel the surface is larger. A full luxury property produces several hundred guest interactions every twenty four hours, and the standard has to hold at every one, because the bar in a Forbes inspection is the lowest touchpoint of the stay rather than the average. Pinar Kartal Timer, then of Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, described the posture inside that challenge: good is never enough, and the team still needs time and coaching to get there.
The pursuit is easily confused with perfectionism of the anxious, self punishing kind, and the operators in this book draw a clear line between the two. That kind aims at the award and burns out the team within eighteen months. The pursuit aims past the award at an internal standard, treats the audits as floors, and keeps the conditions humane enough that a brigade can sustain the work for a decade. Ripert forgets about the stars and focuses on the work, on the belief that the awards follow. Jonnie Boer, in the year De Librije won its first Michelin star, received a substantiated bad review, did not sleep properly for a week, and came back to the kitchen more determined.
What the pursuit asks of a leader is presence at the threshold. The senior person is the final inspector, at the pass or in the lobby, correcting what the guest would have noticed had it not been corrected. Luc Delafosse, then of Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, walked the floor daily, ate lunch in the employee restaurant and spent two hours every evening in the lobby. Brian Gullbrants, then president of Wynn Las Vegas, described the bar that follows from this: ask for excellence and you will get a job well done; demand perfection and you will achieve excellence. The day the leader stops moving in that direction is the day the standard begins, almost imperceptibly, to drift.
The idea runs through Chapter 7, In Pursuit of Perfection, with its three forces of consistency, creativity and care, and it is prepared by Chapter 3, Leading by Example, where the audits are first described as floors rather than ceilings.