The Deadline Effect

How to Work Like It's the Last Minute—Before the Last Minute

Christopher Cox

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982132293
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

In the tradition of Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit, a wise and fascinating book that shows us how " we can make deadlines work for us instead of the other way around" ( The Wall Street Journal ). Perfectionists and procrastinators alike agree—it's natural to dread a deadline. Whether you are completing a masterpiece or just checking off an overwhelming to-do list, the ticking clock signals despair. Christopher Cox knows the panic of the looming deadline all too well—as a magazine editor, he has spent years overseeing writers and journalists who couldn't meet a deadline to save their lives. After putting in a few too many late nights in the newsroom, he became determined to learn the secret of managing deadlines. He set off to observe nine different organizations as they approached a high-pressure deadline. Along the way, Cox made an even greater discovery: these experts didn't just meet their big deadlines—they became more focused, productive, and creative in the process.An entertaining blend of "behavioral science, psychological theory, and academic studies with compelling storytelling and descriptive case studies" ( Financial Times ), The Deadline Effect reveals the time-management strategies these teams used to guarantee success while staying on schedule: a restaurant opening for the first time, a ski resort covering an entire mountain in snow, a farm growing enough lilies in time for Easter, and more. Cox explains how to use deadlines to our advantage, the dynamics of teams and customers, and techniques for using deadlines to make better, more effective decisions.

Creating Checkpoints: Jean-Georges Restaurants

On Monday, May 13, 2019, Jean-Georges Vongerichten got into a car outside his apartment in New York’s West Village and asked to be taken to the airport. It would have been an odd time to leave town: On Tuesday he was opening a new restaurant in Lower Manhattan, on the waterfront facing Brooklyn. But Vongerichten wasn’t flying anywhere. He was going to check in on another restaurant, the Paris Café, which was opening on Wednesday inside the brand-new TWA Hotel at JFK.

Opening two restaurants back to back, on consecutive days, would be impressive for Chipotle or In-N-Out Burger. It’s unheard-of for a fine-dining chef like Vongerichten. It also wasn’t part of the plan. The two openings had been years in the making, both tied up in larger redevelopment projects over which the chef had no control, so he could do little but watch in horror as the deadlines converged on each other: the opening date for the waterfront restaurant, the Fulton, kept getting pushed back, while the one for the Paris Café didn’t budge. As late as mid-April, Vongerichten still thought he would have a few days’ buffer between them, but then that, too, disappeared.

The sixty-two-year-old Vongerichten looked grumpy, or whatever grumpy turns into when it’s deployed on the face of a man whose default mode is glee. The writer Jay McInerney once described him as “George Clooney crossed with a Renaissance putto,” which is hard to improve upon, even as the chef has passed middle age. Now he squirmed in his seat and kept glancing out the window.

The developers of the TWA Hotel had only turned the Paris Café kitchen over to Vongerichten the day before, which was ridiculously late. At the Fulton, the kitchen was ready six weeks before opening, and his team there had been training nonstop since then. The goal for both was to stage an opening night that felt like nothing of the sort, as if the restaurant had been up and running for months. At this point it looked as if only the Fulton would make it. “It’s a massive pressure,” Vongerichten said.

The Fulton and the Paris Café would become Vongerichten’s thirteenth and fourteenth restaurants in New York and bring his worldwide total to thirty-eight. In July, he would add two more, both in the new Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia. Four restaurants in three months is a lot, but 2019 was still slower than 2017, when he opened seven, in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, São Paulo, and London. This pace is intentional. “My dream,” he told me, “would be to open a restaurant a month and then get rid of it.”

Even Vongerichten’s detractors, those who think the individual restaurants suffer for the good of the whole, have trouble hiding their wonder at the juggernaut he has assembled. One critic, in a review of a relatively early addition to the Jean-Georges culinary universe, asked if the chef had perhaps been cloned. Vongerichten himself credits it all to “the formula,” a set of procedures that he and his team put in place to make all these openings run as smoothly as possible.

In the car’s backseat, Daniel Del Vecchio, executive vice president of Jean-Georges Management, was taking calls and typing away on a laptop, his hair slicked back and his eyes a little puffy. In addition to Del Vecchio, who rarely leaves Vongerichten’s side, the two people who are indispensable for openings are Gregory Brainin, who leads a sort of commando unit that trains cooks at Jean-Georges restaurants all over the world, and Lois Freedman, the president of the company and the only person I saw overrule Vongerichten himself. All of them had been with the company for decades. “We’re a very tight-knit group,” Del Vecchio said. When they started, they were simply cooks, but they grew into executives as the business grew. They now oversee 5,000 employees in twelve countries. (Facebook, by comparison had only 3,200 employees when it went public.) Last year, the Jean-Georges group earned $350 million in total sales.

In the car, Vongerichten took a call from the fish supplier for his New York restaurants, running through a list of sea creatures that grew increasingly obscure as he went down it. He and Del Vecchio then talked about the new menus they were having printed for Jean-Georges, the chef’s flagship restaurant on Central Park. They had decided to scrap the à la carte menu and offer only a six- or ten-course tasting, each in both omnivore and vegetarian versions. Vongerichten called it a “major change,” the biggest move he has made since Jean-Georges opened in 1997.

The menu change wasn’t just innovation for its own sake. They had an audience in mind. In 2018, the reviewers for the Michelin Guide downgraded the restaurant from three stars to two—the first time Jean-Georges hadn’t earned the top ranking since Michelin started covering New York. “That was a sad day for us,” Freedman told me. “I was sad for him because he is a chef who’s always in his restaurants. Even though he’s really busy, he’s always in his restaurants working.”

Hidden in that defense is a problem that has been haunting Vongerichten and his team. Is it even possible to run a three-star restaurant and a globe-spanning corporation at the same time? The first is meant to offer a once-in-a-lifetime experience, while the second depends on being able to take that experience and repackage it for different audiences, cuisines, and budgets. To find someone able to do both is incredibly rare, as if Leonardo da Vinci were able to produce both The Last Supper and Last Supper tote bags. Most of Vongerichten’s peers don’t even try: The median number of restaurants for a three-Michelin-star chef in the United States is two.

If Vongerichten didn’t love both equally—the empire and its namesake—his choice would be easy. Only the spinoffs earn him any money. He’s also proud of the system he’s built to open restaurants all over the globe. “We have it down to a science with our team, with Lois and Greg and Danny and everybody,” he says. “We know how to put it all together.” But Vongerichten started his career in France, as a teenage apprentice in a Michelin three-star kitchen, and that rarefied world maintains an unshakable grip on his imagination.

His team is no less committed. Brainin got angry just thinking about the lost star. “We fight like hell every day to ensure that the consistency, the power of the dishes, the pristinity of the ingredients is spot-on every single time without flaws,” he said. (Pristinity, one assumes, combines pristineness and divinity, which is an accurate reflection of Brainin’s attitude toward food.) They had already contacted Michelin and asked them to hold off making their determination for this year’s guide until they had tried the new menu.

So that was the goal for the week: open two restaurants, keep the other thirty-eight running, and somehow start to convince an anonymous group of judges from a tire company that Jean-Georges remains one of the best dining experiences in the world. For the first time since we left the West Village, Vongerichten grew silent. But then he saw the sign for the TWA Hotel and he yelped with happiness. “Look,” he said, “there’s our staff!” Pressed up against the second-floor window of the restaurant was a group of about forty servers and line cooks. They would be using the kitchen for the first time that day. The first customers would be arriving in forty-eight hours.

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To get a sense of what Vongerichten has built, and how he became a deadline savant, it might help to learn his breakfast schedule when he’s in New York. He doesn’t cook in his (huge, immaculate) kitchen at home but rather tours his restaurants. On Monday he eats at the Mercer, in SoHo; on Tuesday he’s at the Mark, on the Upper East Side; on Wednesday he’s at ABCV, in the Flatiron District; Thursday is the wild card; and Friday it’s breakfast at Jean-Georges.

His restaurants don’t feel as if they are part of a chain—though in a manner of speaking, they are. They aren’t hotel restaurants, though a small number of them are in hotels. And, with the exception of Jean-Georges, they aren’t formal dining rooms, though the service at each exudes some of the stateliness of the highest-end, black-tie-and-silver-cloche places. They resemble instead a species of restaurant that has proliferated with the rise of the middle-class foodie. Precise but not fussy. Lush but not luxe. Expensive but not meant for expense accounts. A place you might go on a date night.

Most of the restaurants in this class are one-offs, neighborhood joints created by culinary-school grads and sous chefs who have reached escape velocity from whatever kitchens they trained in. These are passion projects—the realization of a single chef’s vision now that she finally gets to run her own shop. The bewildering trick that Vongerichten and his team have pulled off is to replicate these labors of love, but at scale.

The result is a group of restaurants that feels more like a commonwealth of independent states than an evil empire. A single sensibility inflects them—French technique, Asian spices, light, acidic sauces—but the joy the Jean-Georges team takes in making each place new is apparent. “That’s the best part: creating a menu, a concept,” Vongerichten said. “The hardest part is to keep it running for the next twenty years.”

The highlight reel is impressive: potato-and-goat-cheese terrine with arugula juice at JoJo (Vongerichten, Freedman, and Del Vecchio go there for it every Tuesday); scallops with cauliflower and caper-raisin emulsion at Jean-Georges (a version of which Brainin and Vongerichten use to test new chefs during the hiring process); tuna and tapioca pearls with Thai chiles, Sichuan peppercorns, cinnamon, chipotle, and makrut lime at Spice Market (“We’ve never made food that complicated again,” Brainin said); wild-mushroom burdock noodles, tempeh, and pickles at ABCV (reflecting Vongerichten’s recent preoccupation with health and environmental sustainability). The molten-chocolate cake that took over dessert menus all over the country in the aughts? That came from the menu at Lafayette, the first New York restaurant run by Vongerichten, which he left in 1991.

It’s astounding how consistently his system works. It’s one thing to build something that looks like a neighborhood gem. It’s another to make it a place that people want to go, producing dishes that sway even critics who might otherwise grumble about the whole towering Jean-Georges edifice. (Pete Wells recently coined the term Vongerichtenstein in a review for the New York Times.) Each new restaurant is instantly a Best New Restaurant.

We are suspicious of such profligacy. The metaphors shift from the realm of art to those of the business world: Vongerichten has built a factory, a franchise, an assembly line. You might imagine an enterprise of cut-and-paste, from the lighting in the dining room to the items on the menu. The reality, however, is weirder, a space where rigidity and a more freewheeling spirit can mix.

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The Fulton was born five years ago, in a boardroom overlooking New York Harbor. Its parents were Jean-Georges Management and the Howard Hughes Corporation, the century-old oil, real estate, and aircraft company that has been redeveloping Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. Howard Hughes asked Vongerichten to install a restaurant inside Pier 17, a boxy mall on stilts that they were building over the East River. Vongerichten had always wanted to open a seafood restaurant, and here was a space that couldn’t be any closer to the water, steps from the former Fulton Fish Market. The location determined the concept and the name.

And, for a while, that’s all he had. Construction dragged on, and Vongerichten refuses to begin planning a menu until a restaurant’s design is locked in. Freedman takes the lead during this phase, choosing everything from the color of the banquettes (sea-foam green) to the price point of the water glasses (Pure by Pascale Naessens for Serax—a name only Douglas Adams could love, and just over $7 each wholesale).

Freedman started working for Vongerichten at Lafayette, right out of cooking school. Then, in 1991, together with investor Phil Suarez, they opened a bistro called JoJo. Freedman took over the business end of the restaurant and soon found out she had a knack for it. “I wanted to be able to grow my fingernails and dress up,” she said. “In the kitchen, both of my arms all the way up had burn marks.” When she started, did she imagine she would eventually be running thirty-eight restaurants? “I didn’t think past JoJo at the time,” she said. “No one had multiple restaurants. That just wasn’t what people did back then. Chefs were not expanding.”

At the Fulton, menu planning began in January, once construction was far enough along that Vongerichten and Brainin felt comfortable hiring an executive chef, who would run the restaurant day to day. Normally the Jean-Georges team would promote a sous chef from the flagship to lead the new venture, like a plant propagated through cuttings. But this time they plucked a young chef named Noah Poses from the Watergate Hotel, after a trial tasting that impressed Brainin enough that he didn’t even make Poses audition for Vongerichten himself.

Poses, Brainin, and Vongerichten spent about three months experimenting in the Jean-Georges kitchen until they had a rough draft of a menu. In March, they moved to the kitchen at the Fulton. There they continued to refine the dishes, cutting some and adding others. Anchovies were on the menu (environmentally friendly), and then they were off (not enough people like them). They added snow crab to the risotto. (“Once Jean-Georges tries a better version of something,” Brainin said, “there’s no selling him on going back.”) Some dishes were judged too hard to make in a reasonable amount of time, but a labor-intensive Manhattan clam chowder was included at the last minute because it’s just too popular to ignore.

Newly hired servers learn everything from how to clear a plate from a table to how to talk about the sourcing of the fish. “I don’t mind the knife to be a little crooked on the table, but the person must have a personality, and they must be able to sell,” Vongerichten said. Freedman told me she likes hiring actors as servers because they can memorize long blocks of text.

Once Poses brought his four sous chefs on board in April, they could begin the most important part of the opening process: simulating a real dinner service as early and often as possible. The first of these daily mock services was offered to just twenty employees, then thirty, then forty—until eventually the team opening the Fulton would pull staff members from the corporate office, from the Howard Hughes Corporation, and from their vendors to fill the restaurant. These daily checkpoints on the way to the final deadline were a big part of what Vongerichten meant by his “formula.” They were the secret to flawless openings and satisfied customers.

At the end of each day, Brainin, Vongerichten, and Poses would take the menu they had planned and tweak it, dish by dish. Or, more precisely, gram by gram: Everything in a Jean-Georges restaurant is measured to the gram, and deviations are not allowed. “We make sure that we test, we test, we test, and test again,” Vongerichten said.

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At the final mock service, one week before opening, a line cook prepared a kale salad. Brainin quizzed him on the number of grams of olive oil, of kale leaves, of Parmesan in the salad, and the cook rattled off each one by heart. The cook placed the partly assembled salad on a scale and shaved Parmesan onto it until he hit the desired number. It was ready to serve.

Later, after eating an entire bowl of tagliatelle with clams, Brainin announced that it needed six more grams of olive oil—a little more than a teaspoon—and then it would be done. Compare this with Bill Buford’s description of the same dish in Heat, his account of working in Mario Batali’s kitchen: “the only ingredient that’s measured is the pasta.… Everything else is what you pick with your fingertips, and it’s either a small pinch or a large pinch or something in between: not helpful, but that, alas, is the way quantities are determined in a restaurant.”

I asked one of the culinary trainers working under Brainin if the cooks ever objected to the rigidness of all this gram-counting. “It sounds tedious,” he said, “but you learn to respect the ingredients and the dish.” Obeying the scales was like obeying the rules of a sonnet—a limitation that allowed for almost unlimited artistry. Vongerichten said it was also a clear-cut way to ensure that, even if he weren’t cooking in all thirty-eight of his kitchens, the dishes would still be true to his vision, without any unhelpful improvisations by local cooks. The only other way to achieve the same end would be to radically downsize: “I would have a counter with seven seats. I cook, I serve you, and I clean. That would be J.G. one hundred percent.”

Shortly before the first mock diners arrived, Vongerichten walked through the restaurant. The paper that had covered the windows during construction had just been torn down, so he could see the main selling point, visually, of the location: a full-span view of the Brooklyn Bridge along one whole wall of the restaurant. Vongerichten pronounced it “spectacular.” There were long suede banquettes, nautical-themed lighting that tiptoed right up to Long John Silver territory (lots of hemp), and a hand-painted mural with a Jules Verne vibe on the wall. The chef made his way through the kitchen, the dishwashing area, the patio, the balcony, even the bathrooms. It felt a bit like a Wes Anderson sequence, with various attendants coming up to him with quick yes-or-no queries. The men hanging the sign above the main entrance asked for his okay and he nodded.

Mock service itself resembles normal service, with a few important differences. The guests receive menus, but with their choices highlighted for them. Otherwise, Brainin said, everyone would order the lobster and the kitchen wouldn’t be tested properly. Each guest got one signature cocktail, one appetizer, and one entree. Brainin held up the menu of someone who would be compelled to order the Shiso Gin and Tonic, the Crispy Soft Shell Crabs, and the Parmesan Cheese and Lemon Risotto.

As the orders started to come in, Poses took his position by the pass-through to the kitchen. Brainin was on the line, but he would come out frequently to frown over a plate of food with his new hire. Poses, who was thirty-two, had a young face, and when he and Brainin conferred, it had the appearance of a manager’s visit to the mound to talk it out with a rookie fast-baller. One problem became apparent right away: the runners kept getting backed up near the pass-through to the kitchen. To explain why, Brainin pulled me over to the window to read a ticket. It was a long list of orders for a single table, some hot, some cold, some quick to prepare, and some requiring a nonnegotiably long cook time. The best kitchens will figure out how to prepare everything to come together at the right moment. This kitchen hadn’t gotten there yet, so runners waited with half-full trays for the last item to be finished so they could serve everything at on...