What do you do when you mess up? When something goes wrong and it’s your fault.
Restauranteur Danny Meyer offers this idea in his wonderful book Setting the Table – “write a great last chapter.” Meaning, a mistake is not the end of the story. Meyer applies this idea whenever something goes wrong in his restaurants – an order goes terribly awry, cork lands inside the bottle, something is spilled on the floor or table.
Meyer writes, “Whatever mistake happened, happened. And the person on the receiving end will naturally want to tell anyone who’s interested all about it. That’s to be expected. While we can’t erase what happened, we do have the power to write one last episode so that at least the story ends the way we want. If we write a great one, we will earn a comeback victory with the guest. Also, the guest will have no choice but to focus on how well we responded to the mistake when telling anyone we made it. We can, then, turn a mistake into something positive.”
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