The Perfect Mix: Everything I Know About Leadership I Learned as a Bartender, by Helen Rothberg. Atria Books, 2017. $22. 164 pages.
Reviewed by Jonathan Groner
One aspect of strategy that is often forgotten is the concept of a personal strategy. All of us need to develop a plan for our careers and to check back on a regular basis as life goes on and as things change.
In this unusual, enjoyable and brief business book, consultant and management professor Helen Rothberg looks back to her days as a bartender in a couple of New York City taverns and shows, in a series of brief vignettes, how her bartending experience pointed her education and her career in the right direction. The book contains useful lessons for all of us on the law firm ladder.
For example, in one chapter Rothberg recalls one of the worst possible experiences for a server – a barroom fight, made even worse in this instance because the fight was about her. A new and obnoxious patron made sexually charged comments about Rothberg, and a bar regular, taking her side, decked the guy. Police and an ambulance were called. Not a good look.
Rothberg learned from this episode a lesson about communication. She writes that she should have noticed the assailant’s body language well before he threw the punch and should have defused the situation. “I obviously didn’t think he would cross the line. I trusted him,” she later told the bar owner. “I should have been paying better attention. I know that words can be bullshit and the face tells all.”
Although the confrontation wasn’t her fault in any way, Rothberg still drew a lesson from it for her eventual successful business career.
Communication is about creating meaning. This is not easy. You need to stay awake and pay attention. It means not multitasking when the message matters, not reading email while talking on the phone. It does mean multisensing – reading all the cues available when engaging with someone. . . . It’s important to learn about the people you work with. It contributes to understanding how and what they communicate. However, that knowledge should be a guidepost and not a roadblock. Knowing about a person’s possible response to a situation can be taken into account as a thing to have in the mix and not the thing.
In another chapter, Rothberg emphasizes how important empathy can be in business. She notes that a couple of people she met as a server “had skill sets that made their organizations tick. They could herd the cats, managing the varied personalities and expectations of the people they worked with. . . . Yet beneath their competent exteriors were personal stories that drove them to excel regardless of their ranks in the organizations or the roles that they played.” Sound familiar?
In her efforts to build and develop the analogy of bartending and business, Rothberg sometimes stretches a bit far. Each chapter ends, for example, with a recipe for a cocktail based on the anecdote told in the chapter – and the recipes often include directions such as “Add a splash of civility” or “Infuse with authentic self.” To me, those extra touches sound more than a bit pretentious. But this short book is great fun and can be useful to anyone who is developing or updating a workplace strategy.
By Jonathan Groner, Freelance Writer and Public Relations Consultant for the July/August 2017 LMA Mid-Atlantic Region Newsletter