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What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen

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Re: What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen

#4

A lot of the conflict on those shows is contrived. That show is almost like a procedural drama where the owner's hopeless, resists change, finally sees the light, and then all is set aright by the end. At least in the 5 episodes I've seen.

Also, not all advice from the expert is correct. Maybe there is a good reason not to change the name.

Re: What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen

#5

A lot of the conflict on those shows is contrived. That show is almost like a procedural drama where the owner's hopeless, resists change, finally sees the light, and then all is set aright by the end. At least in the 5 episodes I've seen.

I am with you on this one on most "reality" shows I've seen. In reality nobody asks me to go to a confession room to explain my supposed reasoning in front of a camera. I also find it ridiculous that they always keep the most abrasive yet sub-par contestants until the end to drive up conflict for the added drama.

Having said that I agree with the premise of the author's article since I've worked with too many small business owners in my early days of web development and most of them seemed to reject our tech/marketing strategy for theirs even though they usually waited until a crisis hit before calling us to begin with.

Re: What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen

#6

A lot of the conflict on those shows is contrived. That show is almost like a procedural drama where the owner's hopeless, resists change, finally sees the light, and then all is set aright by the end. At least in the 5 episodes I've seen.

I have a hard time getting past this aspect of reality TV. I recently watched a few episodes of "The Profit" which is basically "Kitchen Nightmares" but for businesses, but it just really bothers me how staged it all seems and how resistant people are to take the advice of a guy on a show who they surely put in a ton of effort to get on and must have seen before. When watching this stuff with other people I find it annoying how no one else really see's through the clearly contrived story they're trying to tell.

Re: What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen

#7

A lot of the conflict on those shows is contrived. That show is almost like a procedural drama where the owner's hopeless, resists change, finally sees the light, and then all is set aright by the end. At least in the 5 episodes I've seen.

No matter how much those conflicts are all made up, I've noticed attitudes like these are far too common.

Re: What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen

#8
post #4

A lot of the conflict on those shows is contrived. That show is almost like a procedural drama where the owner's hopeless, resists change, finally sees the light, and then all is set aright by the end. At least in the 5 episodes I've seen.

Also, not all advice from the expert is correct. Maybe there is a good reason not to change the name.

While I'm all for the HN anti-expert contrarian commentary, let's take a moment to think about this. You, the owner of a failing business, have one view. Gordon Ramsay, the owner of one of the most successful high end restaurant empires in the world, after hearing your justifications, has another. With only this evidence, which view is most likely to be correct?

Re: What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen

#10

A lot of the conflict on those shows is contrived. That show is almost like a procedural drama where the owner's hopeless, resists change, finally sees the light, and then all is set aright by the end. At least in the 5 episodes I've seen.

I happen to live with someone who watches these shows a lot (Kitchen Nightmares, Restaurant Impossible, Save my bar or whatever it's called, etc) and I can totally see how this stuff is pretty fake as each episode always follows the same script and the owners always resist at first, but give in at the end and praise the 'expert'. So I'm not sure if parallels with a 'reality' TV show are entirely in place and representative of what's going on in the real world.

That said the type of 'businessman' the author talks about is everything but fictional. In my 7 years running a web consultancy agency I've come across a lot of these wantrepreneurs who value their status and opinion more than value provided to their customers. I also have been trying to avoid this type of customers as the 20/80 rule applies here very much: 20% of your customers give you 80% of your headaches. My experience with a lot of these 'family' businesses is also that these people often get into the business by heritage and not necessarily because they want to.

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