What the book does
What Could Possibly Go Right? The Essential Journey to Scale an Enduring Culture (Random House, September 2026) is Danny Meyer’s second book, published twenty years after Setting the Table. The gap is the subject. In 2006 Meyer ran eleven restaurants and one Shake Shack kiosk, and he had written that he had never closed a restaurant. A few years later he closed Tabla. The book opens with that decision and with what it did to his understanding of failure, and it goes on to cover the two decades in which his company grew to roughly 700 businesses in 24 countries while trying to keep the culture that made the first eleven worth copying.
The argument is that most organizations know how to scale production and very few know how to scale warmth. Meyer’s answer is to turn culture from a set of values into a set of expected behaviors that can be taught, observed and corrected. He writes about hiring for what he calls the Hospitality Quotient, the emotional skills that make a person happier when they have made someone else feel better. He writes about promoting only people who already embody the culture, because a promotion that contradicts the stated values says more than any speech. He writes about leaders who stop micromanaging and start paying close attention to small things in every location they visit. The book also introduces a set of mantras and tools, among them Don’t F’ing Settle, Change Your Grip, Think Like a Winemaker, the Rule of Two and the Four Gears of Leadership. The title is Meyer’s answer to the pessimism he believes kills most new ideas before they are tried.
The book suits leaders of growing organizations: operators with many units, founders past the stage where they know every employee’s name, and anyone responsible for a culture they can no longer personally supervise. It is candid about the mistakes.
What readers tend to want next
The natural next question after a book about scaling is the opposite one. Meyer describes how a culture survives being multiplied. Readers who run a single house, or who lead one property inside a large brand, want to know how a standard survives being held in one place for thirty years, under one roof, by people who cannot be rotated out when they tire.
A second wish is for the view from the floor. Meyer writes as the founder and chairman of a large company. Readers want to hear from the general managers and chefs who actually carry the culture into a lobby or a kitchen on a Tuesday night, and from operators who have chosen to stay small.
A third is the hotel version. The luxury hotel brands have been scaling culture across continents for decades, and readers want to know how their general managers describe the same problem.
What The Luxury of Attention adds
The Luxury of Attention is my own book. It is built from eighty first person interviews with 36 general managers of the world’s finest hotels and 44 Michelin-starred chefs, and its subject is the discipline Meyer is trying to scale: attention, paid to the guest and to the team, as the thing the best operators produce.
Staying True is the chapter for the single house question. Albert Adrià sets its terms, staying as pure as possible while trying to evolve, and Virgilio Martínez of Central in Lima describes the moment he stopped calibrating his work to critics and started calibrating it to what was fair to his team. The chapter also covers the investor who proposes an expansion, and what a house gives up when it says yes too early. Leading by Example is the view from the floor: Aaron Kaupp of Raffles on the general manager who picks up an empty coffee cup on his way through the lobby, Philip Barnes of The Savoy on being watched by six hundred people, Susanne Hatje of Mandarin Oriental on a general manager who has to be part of every facet of the business and in constant dialogue with the team. First the Team gives the hotel version of Meyer’s hiring argument, with Graham Ledger of Singita weighing character at eighty percent and technical skill at twenty, and Joan Roca of El Celler de Can Roca on growing a kitchen from two cooks to forty without letting the standard move.
Readers interested in how brands hold consistency across properties will also want In Pursuit of Perfection, where Ana Roš of Hiša Franko, Eric Ripert and José Andrés describe a standard they expect never to reach.
A reading order
- Setting the Table, Danny Meyer (2006), if you have not read it, because the new book assumes you have.
- What Could Possibly Go Right?, Danny Meyer (2026), for the twenty years that followed.
- The Luxury of Attention, Rahim B. Kanani (2026), for eighty hoteliers and chefs on holding a standard in one place.
- Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy, Isadore Sharp (2009), for a hotel founder who scaled a culture across continents and wrote down how.