The Past Speaks

In late August, I read a really interesting article about Darden, the parent company of Oliver Garden, the US restaurant chain. The article was filled with neat facts. I learned that the CEO is Clarence Otis, a black guy who grew up in the Watts area of LA during the riot-filled 1960s. Olive Garden revitalized its menu in the 1990s by sending employees to Tuscany to learn from actual Italians. Part of the firm’s success is due to the intelligent use of IT, including the computer systems that ensure you never have to wait long for a meal. I got the impression of a progressive and social responsible company that treats its workers relatively well and competes by being smart, not mean. Read more here.

On 3 September, blogger Matthew Yglesias made a post arguing that universities need to be more like Oliver Garden– they need to find ways to making a quality product cheaper. See here. He wrote:

The point, however, is not to argue the merits of these restaurants but merely to observe that they’re successful. And in particular, they’re successful at exactly what our health care & university systems are terrible at, namely actually balancing cost and quality or even at times finding innovative ways to skimp on quality. I doubt anyone involved would try to convince you that the Olive Garden is the world’s greatest Italian restaurant. But the point of something like their “Culinary Institute of Tuscany” exercise is precisely to identify top-quality practices and then think if there’s some way to do something vaguely similar for radically less money. If you look at the trajectory of college tuition, it’s clear that we’re not going to be able to simultaneously stay on that pace and expand the number of people who go to college. But a college degree seems to be very valuable. If it were possible to provide even a fraction of that value to more people cheaply, we’d be making major progress.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently carried an article that was in reply to Ygelsias’s post about introducing Olive Garden concepts to higher education. See here.