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Business Would Be Easier without People
There are some lessons, in business and in life, that we learn once and never forget. And then there are others that we seem to need to learn the hard way, time and time again, before they stick. For me, one of the toughest lessons to learn took the better part of three decades. It dogged me throughout my years at Panera. Perhaps I’m still learning it. To explain, let me take you back to the first time I learned the lesson.
It was 3 a.m., and I was in the Au Bon Pain kitchen trying to convince a drunk baker that he needed to follow a schedule. This was back in the early eighties, when I was a brand-new entrepreneur, not long out of business school. I was working ninety-hour weeks, figuring out how to ...
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