Alison Beard

speaker

446 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5d ago

Alison Beard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 5.

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HBR IdeaCast · A Leading Restaurateur on What It Takes to Scale a Winning Culture · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

So in any large organization where you have multiple business units and functions.

There is a tendency for sort of micro cultures to develop.

And so I'm just wondering, especially in an organization like yours that before the Shake Shack IPO definitely spanned

Everything from the highest level fine dining to what you call fine casual but a chain.

How did you prevent that from happening or when it did happen, fix it?

What about the tension between corporate office culture, which may be

is incentivized to prioritize profitability and the on the ground culture, whether it's at Shake Shack or the fine dining restaurants, to really care most about pleasing the customer and the team there.

Mm-hmm.

So you write about lots of successes in your business, but also a lot of lows, you know, having to back out of deals and close restaurants, struggling through the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 closures and really serious layoffs.

So how do you keep the vibe positive and the culture strong during those really trying periods?

But in a period when you're having to close restaurants or

make layoffs or cut back, you know, d due to budgetary constraints.

How do you sort of keep the trust of everyone and ensure that everyone's still buying in to the fact that, you know, this is a caring organization that prioritizes hospitality for employees and customers above all else?

Danny, thank you so much for being with me today.

That was Restaurant Tour Danny Meyer.

He's author of the forthcoming book What Could Possibly Go Right?

The Essential Journey to Scale an Enduring Culture.

Next week, Adi speaks with psychologist Martin Seligman about the importance of agency in your career and your organization.

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