Ron Shaich

What is the food and the food attitude?

What is the humanity?

What are the people like?

How do you experience it from a consumer's perspective when you walk in?

And we try to really go deep and use words that mean something in writing that script or that vision for how we're going to compete.

And that becomes an organizing tool.

I mean, just imagine at Panera, we had 125,000 people competing.

How do you get them all aligned with what we're trying to create if you can't put it into words?

But, you know, go fast and fail makes sense in technology where it's very much, there's no fixed cost and you can repair completely.

I'm in a business, I call it fashion with fixed assets.

You know, you build a restaurant, you're going to spend a million, a million and a half, two million dollars, maybe more.

You don't want to mess it up because fixing it is really difficult.

So you want to get very clear what you're doing.

What do you do first, second, third, and make sure you get it in the right order.

So I am much more concerned about getting it right in a really serious way and understanding it and then taking the right steps from that than I am about getting out there and getting market share first.

Because the cost of failure is so high.

Because the cost of failure is extraordinary.

And oftentimes, once you bounce, you can't come back.

And remember, we're talking about fixed assets.

We're talking about, you know, building restaurants.