What Could Possibly Go Right?: The Essential Journey to Scale an Enduring Culture - Hardcover

Meyer, Danny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593731778 ISBN 13: 9780593731772

Publisher: Random House, 2026

Synopsis

Restaurateur, entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author Danny Meyer reveals the secrets of his widely admired leadership philosophy and the tools he uses to build an energized, cohesive, and motivated culture.

“Danny Meyer’s stories and lessons are as memorable as the flavors in his restaurants. I’ve been waiting two decades for this book, and it was worth it.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again and host of the podcast Re:Thinking

In 2006, Danny Meyer owned eleven restaurants, was nurturing a single parkside burger kiosk called Shake Shack, and had just written a bestselling book, Setting the Table, about his company’s unique culture of Enlightened Hospitality. On the first page of that book, Danny proudly declared that in twenty-five years he had never closed a restaurant. But just a few years later, he shuttered his beloved Tabla, a decision that filled him with shame—but sparked a reckoning within him about what it means to be a leader.

Danny realized that his fear of failure wasn’t just misguided: it was also an impediment to his innate entrepreneurial spirit. In What Could Possibly Go Right?, he takes the reader along on his journey to learn how he’s delivered a winning culture of excellence at scale. Businesses and organizations have long understood how to scale systems of production. But it's a much trickier challenge to scale uplifting human relationships, particularly in a fluid, growing organization—one that has now spawned 700 businesses spread across twenty-four countries. As Danny writes, “Along the way, I’ve tripped and scraped my knee more times than I can count, and yet the general trajectory has been upward and to the right.”

What Could Possibly Go Right? offers fascinating, lively stories from the last twenty years of Danny’s career, along with plenty of his trademark mantras (D.F.S—Don’t F’ing Settle; Change Your Grip; and Think Like a Winemaker) and leadership concepts (the Hospitality Quotient; the Rule of Two; and the Four Gears of Leadership). Together, they offer an insightful, practical, and transformative roadmap for success, yes, but more important: for making things that matter and endure. Danny believes that culture is an aspiration, not a destination. When you get your culture on the right path in any field, your missteps end up mattering far less than the innumerable lives you’ll have changed for the better.

About this title

About the Author

Danny Meyer is the New York Times bestselling author of Setting the Table, a book on his leadership philosophy of Enlightened Hospitality; the founder of Shake Shack, which he began as a hot-dog cart in Madison Square Park; and the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG), which has created some of New York’s most beloved and acclaimed restaurants, including Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, The Modern, Maialino, Eleven Madison Park and Tabla. He is the founder of Hospitality Quotient consulting as well as USHG's investment arm, Enlightened Hospitality Investments. Danny has been named a TIME 100 Most Influential Person and won the 2017 Julia Child Award; USHG has won twenty-eight James Beard Awards. Danny and his wife, Audrey, live in New York City and have four children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Every day for twelve years, I would walk from my home to our Indian restaurant, Tabla, in Madison Square Park. On a normal day, it took me seven and a half minutes, door to door. But on a clammy late-summer morning in September 2010, my walk took at least twice as long. I was full of dread and anxiety, and so I took the scenic route—hoping, on some level, to avoid a meeting I had called for the restaurant’s managers the night before. They didn’t know it yet, but in a matter of minutes, I’d be telling them that I had decided to close our beloved restaurant.

This would be a first for me. By that point in my career, I had opened more than fifteen restaurants across New York City and had yet to close a single one of them.

I trudged toward the restaurant, thinking over the message I’d soon deliver. I felt sick for betraying my principles. I felt terrible for Floyd Cardoz, our remarkable chef and now a friend, for whom Tabla was his life’s work. He’d been working his ass off and cooking great food for the previous twelve years, and now he’d lose the restaurant he loved. He’d also be out of a job. But it wasn’t just Floyd. I felt like I had let down the entire Tabla team, whose boundless athleticism and loyalty were the primary reasons we’d survived for as long as we had.

As I approached the front door, I paused and questioned myself one final time: Can I actually go through with this? Will this make me a failure? Am I now the lead actor in a revival of my own father’s life story, whose two bankruptcies haunted me for decades?

When I walked into the restaurant, the first person I saw was a porter who had been with us since the day we’d opened. Polishing the terrazzo floor, he looked up and welcomed me with his trademark smile, having no idea what I was about to say to the managers who’d gathered upstairs. Instinctively, I hugged him, then instead of heading up the stairs, I walked straight to the men’s room and broke into a silent, heaving cry. Taking a moment to gather myself, I slapped some water onto my face and looked in the mirror. You have to do this, I told myself.

Finally, I headed up the winding staircase and into the meeting. Eight managers were seated at a table, overlooking Madison Square Park. When I walked in, their jovial morning banter stopped, and their eyes fixed on me expectantly. They could tell immediately that something was wrong.

I took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry, guys,” I said. “But we need to close the restaurant.”

Twenty years ago, a few years before deciding to close Tabla, I published a book about my approach to culture and hospitality called Setting the Table. On the very first page of that book’s introduction, I proudly noted how in the first twenty-five years of my career, I had never closed a restaurant. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t written that sentence, which was both hubristic and naive. I thought I had it all figured out, but clearly I had a lot to learn—and unlearn—about success and failure. Above all, I would come to understand the powerful role my company’s culture has always played when things have worked, and when they haven’t.

When Setting the Table came out, I owned eleven restaurants and led a team of several hundred people, but I was still very much clinging to my old ways of being a hands-on restaurateur. For the first time in

my career, not all the restaurants were within a short walk from my home. I was only just beginning to understand what it might take to transition from being a restaurateur to being the CEO of a hospitality organization. No longer could I be present in every restaurant at practically every meal. No longer could I greet all our guests. No longer could I meet regularly with each of our chefs and general managers. No longer could I do all the hiring. I still cared about the details, but I couldn’t be everywhere at once. It was clear that I would need to learn a new way to extend my reach, an effective way to multiply my message and impact across a growing, changing company. I needed to figure out how to let go while still hanging on.

I also had to learn how to do this while the world was changing in ways and at a pace none of us could have imagined. Consider that when Setting the Table came out in 2006, there were no smartphones. No App Store. No Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, no Uber, Lyft, or Waymo. Consumers didn’t expect instant delivery of everything on demand, and they hadn’t yet imagined anything like Grubhub, DoorDash, Postmates, Uber Eats, or Instacart. None of us had been introduced to Siri or Alexa, and a future driven by artificial intelligence still felt largely like the stuff of science fiction. We hadn’t experienced the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009—the most severe meltdown since the Great Depression—and New Yorkers hadn’t yet survived the catastrophic superstorm known as Sandy. And of course, none of us had experienced anything remotely as devastating as the coronavirus pandemic, which killed more than one million people in the United States and shut down the entire hospitality industry—not to mention much of the nation’s economy—for months.

Over the past twenty years, I have opened twenty-seven restaurants and closed ten. Shake Shack is another story: In those same two decades, we opened more than seven hundred locations across twenty-four countries, with many more on the horizon.

As I’ve navigated these changes and led our team through all these twists and turns, so many of my old assumptions about leadership and culture—tenets I held dear—melted away. I came to realize that the sense of failure I’d for so long associated with closing a restaurant wasn’t just misguided. It impeded my own entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to try new things. I learned just how much I needed to rely on others with skill sets I lacked if we were going to keep improving as we grew. I had to accept that, with a business of this size, an idea could no longer flow directly from my heart to my brain to my finger to the button it needed to push to get the thing done. I had to learn to persuade someone else (often many others) that the idea was worth pursuing, then trust that they would activate the next sets of buttons. Failing that, my idea, no matter how good, would simply languish. I had to unlearn an old habit, which was to try to retain all our team members at any cost. I came to understand that when someone chooses to disengage, it’s better to let them go.

Throughout my career, I’ve aspired to lead an intentionally uplifting culture of hospitality and excellence—a culture that would, in turn, create and nourish businesses that matter. But what has really gotten me out of bed these past two decades is the quest to learn how to deliver that culture at scale. Businesses and organizations have long understood how to scale systems of production. But for me, it’s a very different, much more interesting challenge to scale uplifting human relationships. Along the way, I’ve tripped and scraped my knee more times than I can count, yet the general trajectory has been upward and to the right. I’ve learned all kinds of hard-won lessons in my own evolution as the leader of a proud company and culture, and I’m eager to share them here with you.

Perhaps the biggest insight I’ve gained is in the title of this book. To my dying day, when it comes to people and ideas, you’ll find me betting on the upside. There’s a world of compelling literature out there that helps people prevent what could possibly go wrong in any given situation, to prepare for the worst. I don’t think I’d enjoy reading it. The literature I prefer to spend my time with suggests that optimists actually live longer than pessimists. And to that end, there’s a quote from Shimon Peres that I love: “Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently. I prefer to live as an optimist.”

I’m not someone who ever sat down and mapped out my professional path. And as you’ll read in the pages that follow, I’ve generated more than my fair share of foolhardy ideas that seemed like a good idea at the time—only to see many of them set us back. But I’m also not going to quit pushing. I’m confident that long after people have lost track of all my mistakes, my team and I will have provided paths to change innumerable lives for the better. And selfishly, by starting from a place of why not?, I’ll have had the chance to explore, experience, and learn from opportunities I’d have never imagined in the first place.

Because rather than focusing on what might not work, I’ve relentlessly pursued what I believed could possibly go right. Over time I’ll make more mistakes than the average person, but by chasing possibilities, I think I’ll also stand a better chance of flying farther and higher. Which is exactly where I want to go.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593731778
• ISBN 13: 9780593731772
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336