When we opened Roast all those years ago, we came across a very welcome problem. We had more people wanting tables than we were able to accommodate. This meant we had to turn tables quickly and in order to that we had to crank up the speed of service to a level we hadn’t been prepared for and as you can imagine, this didn’t at first work out well.

Mistakes were made and one day I was watching a particularly busy lunch session and understanding the thought processes of team members. Food runners would pick up plates, see which tables there were meant for and then make a rapid beeline to get them there. They were at the start point and they knew the end point and their sole mission was to connect the two and get back. This meant they were often barging waiters and even customers in their one-track process.

They weren’t necessarily doing anything wrong – their brief was to get things done as quickly as possible. But it wasn’t an elegant process. I racked my brain as to how to overcome this. Trying to explain neurolinguistic programming to people of 26 different nationalities was never an option but everyone understood dance and theatre, so I engaged a stage director to work with our managers to orchestrate and choregraph each service as if it was a performance with the manager as its conductor.

People learn how to dance first on their own and then with each other. Dancers in a show have to know not just their own routines but those of everyone else on stage so they perform in unison. It was a fun process for the team to understand and anticipate everyone’s sense of space and movement. And it was immediately effective. Runners and waiters gained a spatial awareness that gave them the ability to sway, swerve and be aware of other movement around them rather than just their own.

How many times have you been in a restaurant where you try and get the attention of someone who rather than looking in your direction, instead is on a different mission? Again, they’re not necessarily doing anything wrong – they’re more than likely performing another task but nonetheless you’re left to feel embarrassed or annoyed at them not noticing you.

That’s why the final part of that exercise was that I would regularly have lunch with team members so they could see things from the customers’ perspective and then fully understand the reason for the process we’d undertaken.

Because you can’t really be a star performer in a show unless you’ve been in the audience.

Today’s review by Jay Rayner of a restaurant that was set up by someone who had come from a care home and only recruited others who had similar backgrounds is a touching story on many levels. He’d scraped all his savings together to get the place open, painting the sign himself and getting in second-hand equipment to make his dream come true only to have it shattered when vandals broke in and wrecked what they couldn’t steal.

But neighbours who had enjoyed the place scrummaged together and collected enough money to get the restaurant back up and running and today’s piece should ensure that trade is brisk and hopefully more care leavers can now be recruited. There’s been much discussion in recent years of the role businesses can and should play in their communities and this story takes us to a new level where communities can and should play with businesses they empathise with.

This fits neatly with the publication of the latest Edelman Trust Barometer which shows once again that businesses are more trusted by the public than charities, government and media. Distrust in the last two fuel each other. I remember the former Newsnight anchor man Jeremy Paxman describing his interview technique around the thought: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” That government is slightly more trusted than media is a bit surprising, though another respected columnist in Jay Rayner’s paper today uses this line “But if I’m being honest….” so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Should we not believe anything she says unless a sentence starts like that?  

And perhaps next year Edelman can add a new category of “Each other”. My guess it would rank between business and charities.

The fact that businesses are now regularly seen as the most reliable vehicle to do the right thing should now crank up a notch from the spirit of those who revived that restaurant. If the establishment of trust lies at the essence of creating a great business brand, we should now pursue the reversal of that relationship and perhaps we’ve missed a trick in not doing so in past and we’re now having to play catch-up with what people in communities are actively doing.

If people are buying their next clothes from the Oxfam shop because they’re broke or because they want to slow down fast fashion rather than because they want to support Oxfam, both businesses and charities need to get on board with how people are thinking and behaving rather than just sell them on how we are thinking and behaving.

It’s slightly lazy to say that it doesn’t matter why they shop at Oxfam just as long as they do. Maybe that’s all charities can do but businesses can do more. Over the past few weeks, I have been getting my head around apps using artificial intelligence techniques that can ascertain the mood of people in a room or for venues to play the music that the people in it want to rather than what the promoters want to play. Have a look at this.

Business shouldn’t just be listening to conversations to act on them. In order to maximise our impact, we need to be part of those conversations.

In his film The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais plays a screenwriter in a world where not only does everyone tell the truth, but they tell uncomfortable truths with no filter, like a receptionist in a restaurant greeting a confident and attractive customer, who says to her: “I’m intimidated by you”.

Gervais makes a fortune when he decides to start making things up. In a world where people believe everything, his stories about an entity who oversees all of us and who has created an afterlife are lapped up by people who thought they began and ended on earth. I imagine Gervais is an atheist.

Sometimes I wish I was better at lying.  I think it would probably have made me a more successful businessperson.

Politicians do it all the time in full public view and it helps them keep going, but businesspeople also successfully do it all the time and get away with it too – unless it spills into fraud.

In business, it’s quite often a dangerous thing to be honest. If you tell your team that it’s going to be a struggle to make payroll this week, they’re unlikely to turn up for work the next day. If you tell a supplier you’ve been having some difficulties, your next day’s delivery isn’t going to happen.  Sometimes it’s best to just say nothing; silence, after all, is not denial.

A few decades back, Albert Carr, an American economist and presidential advisor, wrote:

“Most executives from time to time are almost compelled, in the interests of their companies or themselves, to practice some form of deception when negotiating with customers, dealers, labor unions, government officials, or even other departments of their companies. By conscious misstatements, concealment of pertinent facts, or exaggeration—in short, by bluffing—they seek to persuade others to agree with them. I think it is fair to say that if the individual executive refuses to bluff from time to time—if he feels obligated to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—he is ignoring opportunities permitted under the rules and is at a heavy disadvantage in his business dealings.”

It’s an unspoken rule in much of business that if you don’t bluff (window dressed word for lying), you’re a loser.

In marketing, this has been the case for decades. That’s why the terms “PR” and “bullshit” have historically been inextricably linked. Last year, two respected communications specialists, John O’Brien and David Gallagher, set about dismantling this with their book Truth Be Told. In a time where businesses are increasingly seeking their purpose, by which I mean shaping their enterprises to help build a fairer, more sustainable world, we are being held to account by consumers who are increasingly suspicious of companies and the claims we make. “It’s an occupation for a few, but a preoccupation for the many,” John says.

For marketing to have authenticity, purpose needs to be a company-wide belief. A few years back Unilever were hailed for its ambition to double sales whilst halving its carbon emissions. But it didn’t take its shareholders with it on that journey and their biggest one last week said: “Anyone thinking we need to find the purpose of Hellman’s mayonnaise has clearly lost the plot”. If we’re going to strive for truth and honesty to be the new norm for business, every key stakeholder will need to actively buy into the plan as otherwise it will fail.

And that’s no lie.

There was a brief phase in my late teens when I had transitioned from being a street hustling troublemaker who failed all his O levels into this ultra-nerdy swot. In that thankfully brief period, I skipped out of joining friends in pubs and discos and spent my time devouring books, writing pamphlets and attending evening lectures. One of them was given by Sir Bernard Williams, then Britain’s greatest living philosopher.

He delivered his entire talk on whether we are responsible for the consequences of our actions to a raptured audience sat at a table with his head in his hands and though that was 40 years ago, I still remember everything he said. Today, where presentation is key, this would simply not have been deemed acceptable. The most popular speakers today are those with the most effective slide shows and engaging manners. Imagine doing a Ted talk the way the great professor spoke.

The same goes with food. This week I was lucky enough to twice be treated to new Indian restaurants in Mayfair – Manthan and Bibi. I was told the other day that London now has more Indian restaurants with Michelin stars than Italian ones. These two new ones will probably get stars too and it won’t be long at this rate before Indian starred places in London outstrip French ones.

Mayfair diners walking in to Manthan would be hard pushed to remember that it was formerly a cheap and cheerful establishment with its new lush furniture and flamboyantly attired front of house folk. And yesterday, as soon as we sat down at Bibi, we immediately began drooling at the presentation of the dishes that neighbouring tables were enjoying.

Whereas 20 years ago when I brought chef Vivek Singh over from Jaipur to work with my pal Eric Chavot, who then held two stars, to devise a new style of presentation of Indian dishes, a process subsequently each further chef who we brought over also went through, The Cinnamon Club was out on its own. Our interiors and the photography we commissioned to hang on the many walls completed the contrast to other Indian restaurants at the time.

Whilst conventional curry houses face a seemingly terminal decline, the cuisine does not. In Mayfair, it’s boom time. The lamb chops at Gymkhana will set you back £48 and yet it’s booked solid for months. Go for the tasting menu at Benares with prestige wines and you’ll be paying £214 each.

Curry house trade associations who bemoan the fact that they can’t bring chefs anymore from the subcontinent should go and see Bibi, where none of the chefs yesterday in their open kitchen were Asian and neither were any of the front of house, yet managers and waiters working our table spoke authoritatively about how each dish was prepared and the provenance of the ingredients used.

The east end may now be a hipster hangout rather than a curry club, but Indian operators have injected a new lease of life to the west end and not just with upmarket establishments. Alongside the legend that is Dishoom, the street food chain Mowgli has recently made its foray here too.

The only sad note in all of this is that the Bangladeshi pioneers who gave Britain its love of this cuisine are being leapfrogged by entrepreneurs who won’t have suffered the drudgery and abuse those early guys had to endure for the new guys to profit from. So, whilst we should celebrate the progress, we shouldn’t forget the pioneers.

Some time ago, a successful journalist friend took me aback by saying he wanted to write my biography, to which I replied firstly I haven’t done enough yet (most definitely true) and secondly, when the time came, it would be better if I wrote it myself (quite possibly true).

This morning, at the end of a year ever where I have been excitedly composing, de-composing and re-composing plans for What I Do Next, I’ve opened up a document which since that conversation I have been occasionally adding stuff into on the basis that when I’m in full swing again I won’t have time to do. I told another friend the other day that it currently sits at 40,000 words who wasn’t sure if I was joking when I said the next chapter will start “And then when I was two…,”.

Undoubtedly 2021 has for many been the worst year of their lives but for some friends of mine it has been their best one ever. For me it has simply been the most inactive one with little to show for it apart from a list as long as your arm of ideas I’ve drummed up and shared with an inner circle who’ve felt obliged to hear/read me out on them. Countless long lunches later, I think I finally have something I’m ready to go with.

Encouraged by seeing many friends entering into their sixties also entering into the busiest and most successful phases of their lives, which has been based on decades of their learning and establishing reputation and not marred by Covid, I have realised I have some catching up to do. More importantly, I need to activate my belief that business must be at the forefront of tackling inequality and saving the planet.

Those words need to become actions and they need to be activated at scale if they are to be meaningful.

I’m betting on a better 2022 and hope the same for all of you.

Some years back I helped a friend called Sahara Quli set up a social enterprise in Croydon called Mum’s The Chef to enable mothers to come off benefits by training and work in a catering company she’d set up. They did all the cooking for the regular lunch parties I used to have at home. Everyone loved their food, which some days was Pakistani, sometimes Jamaican, sometimes Sierra Leonian and guests loved the back story. I wrote this at the time about them.

Sadly, the project slowly faded down for a variety of reasons but as well as seeing women’s lives have a purpose beyond their family, there have been many more miserable experiences that we don’t often discuss and Sahara is now looking to create a new business that tackles these full on.

Here’s a story that’s hopefully going to make you all think twice.

One night a woman whom we’ll call Crane had got drunk and fallen asleep on her sofa and at around 2am, her two-year-old, three-year-old and five-year-old kids had opened the front door and wandered out into the streets of Croydon. At around 3am the police caught them.

Your first thought: an unfit mother, right?

We are quick at condemning, but pretty useless at understanding, even more useless at fixing.

Here’s the back story and it’s a grim one. She’d gotten drunk, knowing her kids were asleep in bed, because of an argument she’d had on the phone with her mother who wanted money. Again, on the face of it, no call for sympathy. But Crane’s mother was a drug addict and had been all the while Crane was growing up. As she was on benefits, she couldn’t afford to pay for the drugs and so from the age of nine, Crane was offered up to the dealers for sex to fuel her mother’s habits. In London.

For two years Crane was raped and sexually abused and then eventually aged 11 hospitalised after being violently assaulted for refusing to do so anymore. From there she went into care and then a foster home and realised that she had been wrong all this time thinking her mother loved her. She tried in early adult life to live independently but because of a government policy known as the Benefits Cap, she couldn’t get enough money to pay for her rent. Mums The Chef stepped in, gave Crane training and then work in shifts that enabled her to also look after her children and avoid eviction.

With the pandemic, a Mum’s The Chef’s café could no longer operate but instead of throwing in the towel, they pivoted once more, this time setting up Crane and other mums to get council permission to cater from their own homes and set them up with Uber Eats and Deliveroo contracts. One of the mums who used to do my lunches is now making enough money to go and visit Jamaica twice in a year and Crane now has earned enough to put a deposit down on a mortgage.

The plan is now to regroup these mums to work a new enterprise jointly with other victims of abuse, of which I’m afraid I’ve been reading many case studies as depressing as Crane’s.

Once again, there’s a business solution we assumed state and society would/could/should fix but hasn’t.

Each morning I spend all of about a minute on Instagram and today I saw an interview on behavioural change with my super-smart friend June Sarpong who’s sorting out the BBC’s massive diversity issues in which she said: “The first thing to do is to connect with the most disenfranchised group within your organisation and ask them what their experiences of your organisation are. That’s going to tell you everything about your culture.”

Around 20 years ago, in a round-about fashion, I realised my mistake in not doing this when opening my first major restaurant. When you finally open a place that’s been a dream in your head for so long, it’s never going to work out as well as when it was just in your head. With the launch of The Cinnamon Club, the things that weren’t working were entirely my fault and two early customer interventions gave me the reality check face slaps I needed.

The first was from a week one diner, who called me over and said: “I’m guessing this is your place and I’d like to give you a piece of advice. You pacing up and down the room looking anxious is only making the staff nervous and therefore more likely to get things wrong. So, either learn to calm down or stay off the floor.” I wish I’d taken his card so I could attribute him to something no-one else had said to me.

I do know the name of the second person who helped me to steer the business quickly into a better shape. It was Tom Long, the global CEO of Coca Cola who a friend had brought to dinner. During their meal I went over and asked Tom not for the usual restaurant practice of fishing for a compliment but instead to give me something I could learn from. He leaned back and said to me: “Tell me Iqbal. From the minute you walk in, to the minute you walk out, is everything here the Cinnamon Club experience you’ve told everyone it was going to be?”

What a brilliant question. I thought about it and said that if I had understood correctly, I had been so focussed on selling the idea of The Cinnamon Club to the press and public that I had forgotten to sell the idea to my own team. “You fix that,” he said, “and you’ll have yourself a great restaurant.”

The next day I hired a branding firm to undertake some inward messaging and they presented to every single employee in groups of six what we stood for and how they were the key to the mission. I followed up with something I continued to do for 20 years first there and then at Roast and that was to have lunch once a month with junior members of the team. That covered four purposes – firstly, they got to dine in the restaurant they worked in, secondly, I got to hear their own personal back stories, thirdly, they got to hear about what made me want to do it (in 20 years, always the first question I’ve been asked) and finally towards the end of the lunch I would say to one of my guests: “If I gave you the keys to this restaurant and it was now yours, what would be the first things you would change?”

Virtually every time, a change was made following one of those lunches.

And that’s how I did was June was talking about yesterday.

Also yesterday, the friend who brought Tom Long in back then said he was having dinner with him again that night and I asked him to let Tom know he has an unwritten part in the success of that place.

A couple of years ago I began plotting not just about new restaurants, as I always do, but about a new way of doing business, where tackling social inequalities and helping save the planet were core motivators and where beautiful food, drink and service were our weapons of choice and that this would actually make us more profitable rather than less. The idea really began to take shape when I was recommended to contact an organisation called Blueprint for Better Business who assigned me a coach to meld a desire into an intellectually rigorous and commercially water-tight approach.

And boy, did I get a great coach.

Loughlin Hickey had recently retired as Global Head of Tax at KPMG. He kicked the tires on my thinking, challenged each and every one of my assumptions, made me think things I hadn’t actually considered and now with the help of my brilliant friends at Good Business, we have shaped all that into a framework which we’re pretty confident will be unique to the restaurant world when we finally unleash it.

You don’t get to have a career position like Loughlin’s without being super smart, so when I was having lunch with him earlier this week at The Conduit (obviously) I had a sharp intake of breath when he told me he hadn’t been to university. He says he was a cheeky Essex boy and his good marks in internal school tests masked his lack of application to studying hard for his A Levels and so he didn’t get the grades he needed.  Instead, he started looking for work. He got a job through one of his Mum’s friends who was a secretary at a firm of accountants and knuckled down to train.

This friend believed in him, unlike some others who reacted to his Mum telling them her son had 10 O Levels that she must be lying as no Irish kid could get 10 O-Levels (these were the days when you would see signs saying “No blacks, No dogs, No Irish”). He then got into KPMG (and credit to them to look beyond his lack of a degree) and became a partner at the age of 31, far quicker than his contemporaries who were all Oxbridge and the rest is history.

In the past, people who achieved against the odds never spoke about how they had got to where they had and in fact often cut from beneath them the rope of the career ladder when they’d got to the top of their organisations or professions in case others managed the same and they were found out.

These days there’s much talk about social mobility and inside organisations we need to rebuild that rope downwards and give that hand up in order that people can avoid the dreaded imposter syndrome so many people face. Latest reports suggest we are failing dismally here.

And sometimes it’s really easy to fix. A few years ago, I started mentoring a young black kid of modest means from a state school in Croydon who’d got into the LSE. Just before starting he panicked and asked me how he was going to fare when everyone else was middle class and public school. I told him his background would make him the most interesting person in the room because he had got there without any sense of entitlement. I told him he should flaunt his upbringing, not hide it.

With that, he strode in, left with a First and now has a flourishing business. Writing this reminds me that I need to check how his own rope throwing activities are going.

We’ve been reading a lot about this Salt Bae character whose new Knightsbridge restaurant charges £630 for steak and people are getting lathered up about it. But as long as there are enough crazy folk out there willing to pay those prices, and who have sufficiently deep pockets allowing them to do so, I really don’t see who’s being harmed.

There’s a much bigger harm issue at stake though which doesn’t get the kind of attention that Salt Bae generates and that is about the true cost of food. A study in America earlier this year about what we really ought to be paying for our food found it is actually three times what we do pay. Americans pay $1.1 trillion a year for food – calculated by aggregating production, retail, processing and wholesaling. What it doesn’t cover is human health, biodiversity loss and environmental impacts which were calculated to come to a further $2.1 trillion, human health being the biggest omission.

What and how we eat come with enormous price tags: the medical costs consequences of eating choices meant for example that tackling obesity costs America $359 billion whilst tackling hypertension and diabetes came to a further $600 billion. Billion. A year.

The proportions for here in Britain are not much different. A 2017 study found that every £1 spent on food generates 50 pence worth of spending on health care alone.

In a world where 800 million are hungry yet two billion are overweight or obese, we’re heading for a crash course to oblivion. Or rather, we’re eating our way there.

So how do we avert this? Well, it needs to be an integrated approach and there’s a G20 initiative to start by having a universally accepted definition of the true cost of food. There’s masses of evidence to support the case that we are in dire need of one and G20 has rightly made this an essential first step.  

As another report states: “If market prices (along the supply chain as well as for the consumer) integrate the true costs of food and are supported by effective policies and civil society interventions, the right incentives will be given and investments will flow to where capital creates the most social and environmental value. For instance, sustainably produced fruits, nuts and whole grains, which are key components of healthy diets, will be cheaper than food with low dietary quality.”

For businesses to get on board with what’s known as “true cost accounting”, we will have to act in unison. Policy makers need to get us on board as ultimately, it’s in everyone’s interest that we break the current system before it breaks us.

I’ve just ordered a load of copies of a book I wrote five years ago to give to members of a team I’ve assembled for a monumentally delayed project, more about which soon.

The main argument in Charity Sucks is that businesses – not governments or non-profits –  have to be the best agents for social and environmental change, the only sustainable base and the only credible place from which discipline and rigour can be applied not to do things other than create shareholder value, but to actually increase shareholder value by recognising that our role in fixing the world is not a diversion as was previously considered the case but as a core value that actually enhances profitability.

The ways in which businesses are empowered at their very outset are as important as what they deliver. Take the legendary Muhammad Yunus, founder of The Grameen Bank and the man who made microfinancing a global phenomenon. Watching how women in Bangladeshi villages trying to make a living for themselves were so severely held back by having to service usury repayments from predatory lenders (what here we call loan sharks), the Nobel Prize winner switched the model around and created “solidarity lending” where peers and neighbours would vouch for an applicant’s integrity and ability to repay.

Over eight million people, 97% of whom are women, have now been through Grameen and the bank has a default rate that western banks can only dream of.

In the west, the notion of business as a force for good has been in circulation for a while but as a movement, it has only recently started to become compelling. Social enterprises and B Corporations are seeing their ascendency rise, especially now with the aforementioned vigour themselves where we have to measure performance against promise.

Start ups have arguably the pole position for this. At my last restaurant Roast, many of our social and sustainable activities were bolted on incrementally over time partly because I was early in my learning on what this all means, partly because we could afford to as the place did so well which allowed me to focus on creating seemingly implausible impacts. With a new business right now, the tunnel vision of getting funded and trading is changing as we put on varifocal lenses and look all around us, see what needs fixing (loads) and where we can draw inspiration from (Patagonia for me) and build our models by pressing the pause button to strengthen our base line which will allow us to make our starting point a tipping point.

Given the noise that Charity Sucks created, I asked a literary agent whether I should write a follow-up predicting a new era for capitalism and her reply was: “Don’t just predict it – prove it with your next business.”

Moving from prediction to proof will bring new energy to any business. The ambition then has to be making that energy renewable.