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

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.

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.