In RELENTLESS GROWTH: Cultivating a Chef’s Mindset for Professional Fulfillment, executive chef and hospitality consultant Franck Desplechin begins with a story about applying for a position as head pastry chef at a resort in Hawaii despite a rather significant challenge: “I had to find a way to convince [the general manager] I was the right person for the job—minus the ability to speak, understand, or write the language.” He got the job, and attributed his success to “a bulletproof mindset, a refusal to accept failure, an obsessive unwillingness to give up, and, let’s be honest, an awful lot of luck.”
The entire 225-page book follows this formula. Desplechin tells a story in a few paragraphs, and the rest of the chapter expounds on the leadership lessons that he learned from the experience. “Growth as an art demands that we look at life differently, that we see the beauty in failure or find the lesson in struggle,” he explains. Yet Desplechin also paints a self-portrait as a person who found his life’s passion early (he dropped out of school at 14 to work in restaurant kitchens) and obsesses over perfection. His advice can only be usefully adopted by people equally fixated on success (and whose passions, like cooking, allow them to earn a good living).
Most of his stories are about the challenges he faced in various chef posts throughout his career, but all the stories are incomplete. He describes the challenges yet never goes into details about how he overcame them. Instead, he gives general advice: “True adaptability begins when you learn to embrace disruption rather than resist it,” and “when you shift your mindset to view disruption as a catalyst for innovation and opportunity, you unlock your potential to lead with vision.”
The problem is, Desplechin’s stories are much more interesting than the often-anodyne lessons he derives from them. Also missing is the personal element. What room does obsession with professional growth leave for a personal life? Desplechin mentions only in passing that he met his wife when he took a new job (she was on the marketing staff), and only at the end of the book does he bring up his children. They arrive after he has shifted from being an executive chef to a consultant. In the book’s final pages, he writes that, without that career change, “I would not have had the chance to spend these precious, transformative years raising my two daughters.” This seems to contradict the rest of the book’s philosophy, but RELENTLESS GROWTH is still a nice read for its target audience.
As the title suggests, Franck Desplechin’s RELENTLESS GROWTH: Cultivating a Chef’s Mindset for Professional Fulfillment is a well-written book best suited for people obsessed with success.
~ Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader