7 Business Lessons From Lady Gaga and Madonna

Cookwork Perspective: Madonna and Lady Gaga are nothing if not media and marketing driven. How do you manage your brand? Do you leverage opportunities well?

7 Business Lessons From Lady Gaga and Madonna

Two iconic female performers—Madonna and Lady Gaga—are hitting the road for tours this summer and fall. Madonna is the bestselling female recording artist of all time, and Gaga is close behind. As these two set out to rake in mega-millions of dollars,...

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6 Leadership Styles, And When You Should Use Them

Cookwork Perspective: Chefs are known for being demanding. Here is a guide to leadership styles that could be more effective in motivating your staff.

6 Leadership Styles, And When You Should Use Them

Taking a team from ordinary to extraordinary means understanding and embracing the difference between management and leadership. According to writer and consultant Peter Drucker, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

Manager and leader are two completely different...

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Are You Buying a Job or a Profitable Business?

Cookwork Perspective: Many chefs are approached with the opportunity to buy into franchises or existing businesses. Take the time to properly evaluate the business before opening your wallet or you could just be buying a job.

Are You Buying a Job or a Profitable Business?

If the current owner is working in the business but not taking any compensation, come up with a reasonable compensation figure and deduct that amount from the profit the business...

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Customer Service: How to handle difficult customers

Cookwork Perspective: Every business has them. Businesses that sell food seem to attract them. Setting boundaries is just one way to keep difficult customers in line.

Customer Service: How to Handle Pushy Customers

Don't let your company get backed into a corner by a cascade of demands. Here's how to strike a deal that satisfies everyone.

I watched this interchange at a friend's house between a mom and a 4-year-old child:

"Sweetie, it's not time...

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Study: Online Marketing Helps Restaurants Personalize Offers

Cookwork Perspective: How and where you talk to your customers can be as important as what you say. See how a variety of marketing methods can lead to better results for your efforts.

Study: Online marketing helps restaurants personalize offers

Restaurants use online and email marketing to provide consumers the personalized offers they prefer, according to new research by the National Restaurant Association released earlier this week. The research found that electronic marketing channels complement...

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How Restaurants Can Succeed With Pinterest

Cookwork Perspective: Pinterest is the latest social media platform that's getting a lot of buzz. Unlike Twitter that relies on words, Pinterest relies on photographs. See what it can do for you.

How restaurants can succeed with Pinterest

In the fast-changing social-media world, new platform darlings appear at a regular clip. The latest, Pinterest.com, seems to be pinning competitive hopes to the wall and drawing interest from restaurant marketers.

Earlier in February, Pinterest passed 10.4...

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How 5 Minutes A Day Can Change The Way You Train Your Workers

Cookwork Perspective: Do you have a formal training plan in place for your employees? See how to do this in an effective and painless way.

How 5 minutes a day can change the way you train your workers

Foodservice professionals from across the country gathered in Washington, D.C., this week for the Food Safety Summit, a three-day event packed with exhibitors, information sessions and workshops focused on minimizing risk and increasing traceability and smart food...

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9 Ways To Be Brilliant At The Basics

Cookwork Perspective: 9 basic areas for you to be focusing on to have a successful business. How many of these are you doing?

Fundamentals: 9 ways to be brilliant at the new basics

You can’t build a pyramid from the top down. A house without a strong foundation will not stand. And a business without fundamentals firmly entrenched and dutifully executed can wither and shrink as small as the period that ends this sentence. There...

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Maximize Your Annual Conference Experience

Cookwork Perspective: With the National Restaurant Show in May, There's no better time to start planning your strategy for how to get the most out of your trip.

Maximize Your Annual Conference Experience

For the last 10 years I have attended the same industry conference with the intentions of learning how to destroy the competition and grow my business with all the new knowledge I will be collecting as I sit through keynote speakers, breakout...

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Sharks Fin No More

Cookwork Perspective: The luxury hotel, Shangri-La, vows to stop serving sharks fin in all of its 72 hotels. Will you join them at this campaign?

Ban on Shark Fin Soup Advances Through Asia

HONG KONG—A swell of opposition against shark fin soup—a traditional but increasingly controversial Chinese dish—gained backing from the luxury Shangri-La hotel chain just days before Lunar New Year, underscoring efforts world-wide to stop the hunting and trading of the endangered fish.

Shangri-La...

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