Danny Meyer Quotes

Great leaders don't rush to blame. They instinctively look for solutions.

At my restaurants, we have training drills before every meal. We talk about what we did yesterday that was great and what we can improve today.

Too often, when people are in trouble they look for scapegoats.

The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it.

It was easy for me in my bathrobe to provide really great customer service. As an introvert, it's really much easier to do than when standing in a retail store.

It isn't making mistakes that's critical; it's correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

Great presidents, and even those not so great, never complained about the hands they were dealt. Just the opposite. They assumed they were in the big chair to meet big challenges, no matter how difficult.

Some day, someone will do something wrong and there will be a scandal to report in the paper. When that happens, we will address it honestly and openly and try to deal with it as quickly and as fairly as we can, and keep moving the city forward.

As a restaurateur, my job is to basically control the chaos and the drama. There's always going to be chaos in the restaurant business.

I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well.

I'm not going to sit here and bash the manager, we have to regroup.

When I see something that needs to be corrected, I may talk to a store manager. I don't want to demoralize people when it's beyond their control.

The last question I would ask of someone I was considering appointing to office is how he would act in a specific situation.

As a politician, you can run from your problems or run toward your problems.

I will say this about the truth - that it's one of those crisis rules, whether you are a client or someone who's living their life just every day - is that the truth has a funny way of not going away, and telling the truth is extremely important in dealing with any problem or crisis.

It's all about being professional. You can't be dwelling on mistakes.

You become a leader in times of trouble. Leaders emerge when things don't go well. When everyone else starts pointing fingers, a leader takes responsibility.

Iraq is sort of a situation where you've got a guy who drove the bus into the ditch. You obviously have to get the bus out of the ditch, and that's not easy to do, although you probably should fire the driver.

Conflict is like cancer; early detection increases the possibility of a healthy outcome.

Deliver total quality to every customer every day.

In Washington, as we learned from the White House transcripts, a president may speak of kicking butts, call a problem a can of worms, decide not to be in the position of basically hunkering down, anticipate something hitting the fan, propose to tough it through, sight minefields down the road, see somebody playing hard ball, claim political savvy, and wonder what stroke some of his associates have with others.

The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

Many years ago I sent an old, beloved jacket to a cleaner, the Sycamore Cleaners. It was a leather jacket covered in Guinness and blood and marmalade, one of those jobs... and it came back with a little note pinned to it, and on the note it said, 'It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.' So that will do for me. That can go on my tombstone.

I was literally calling my customers who were complaining on social media and having a dialog with them, and sending them money.

If I had a kid, and I had a choice between teaching somebody how to avoid trouble, or teaching them how to get out of it, I'd teach them how to get out of it.