Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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The Welcoming Leader

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The Welcoming Leader: “Welcoming leadership is about inspiring people to want to achieve common goals. For a welcoming leader, the emphasis is on the person. … It requires an honesty and authenticity from you as a leader that has been lacking in many of our bosses in the past. In a world where everything looks similar—products and places, companies and countries—a guest or employee makes his decision to participate and commit based on how welcome he feels. To provide hostmanship … we have to rejoice in serving others and provide leadership that reflects this.”

Hostmanship: The Art of Making People Feel Welcome

Authors Jan Gunnarsson and Olle Blohm are getting their great message out not just in Scandinavia but also in the USA now

Creative Halfway meeting

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TIVOLI GROW Leadership presentation

Today we reached the halfway point with the TIVOLI management team who are doing our GROW Leadership programme at the moment – that is the day they present their personal chalenges to the CEO and each other. This is always good fun and a time when teams display lots of creativity.

img_3981.jpg . One manager showed his management team as a garden with plants. Each plant has special instructions as to how it is best cared for. Nice metaphor.img_3980.jpgAnother illustrated the complexity of the task at hand with this collection of sticks – each stick was labled – service, food cost, Guest satisfaction etc – the point was touch one and you affect the others…

We had a great day!

Pizza Cone – next big thing in fast food ?

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Grab, Grip and no drip has been the mantra of success in the Fast Food business for years. Pionered by the Americans and their need to drive and eat. You can eat a hot dog or posibly a burger in your car – but you can’t walk on a crowded street and talk in your cell phone and eat a burger at the same time. Solution a hand held meal in a cone – simple and obvious once you have seen it. Pizza Cones are the big thing i Korea and rapidely spreading to other parts of Asia.

More on this:

PizzaKonno

CrispyCone

Pizza Kones

Welcome to our new website!

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For a long time now I have wanted to combine the Thoughts4action blog with our website so as not to have to manage two websites. For the time being we are sticking to English here but i will be adding Danish language pages on Danish topics very soon – so stay tunned.

We will also be moving most of the posts and articles from the T4A blog over to this website in the future – step by step – but now we are headed in the right direction.

If you have comments or ideas please let me know

Mike

Max Brenner chocolate bars

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The centre of this new chocolate culture, Max Brenner chocolate bars are open from morning til late, changing throughout the day. In the mornings, soft jazz music plays while people hug hot chocolate in their hands; in the evenings, the mood becomes more sensual as the music changes, candles are lit and the crowd becomes more intimate.

The brand is heavy on storytelling, and on ceremony. Brenner wants to change the way people experience chocolate, turning consumption into a ceremony, with its own special utensils, textures and tastes, much like wine and coffee. The chocolate drinks menu spans four pages, including chocolate granitas and frozen chocolate cocktails for hot summer days. Special cups were created for different ways of drinking chocolate. Shown above are the Hug Mug, shaped for hugging in both hands; Alice, the ‘ultimate’ milkshake cup; and the Suckao, a special cup with a metal straw and candle underneath designed for preparing thick hot chocolate from hot milk and flakes of chocolate.

More on this at Springwise

Illy Comes to Your Corner

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Illy

A few years ago, Illy defined a handful of Illy Bar Concepts: the Core Bar is situated in historic centers, and functions as a meeting point that expresses the culture and the daily life of its location. Landscape Bars are set in busier areas, such as shopping malls or museums, and are meant to provide a restorative break. Transit Bars are spacious bars for travellers, in stations or airports; Community Bars serve regular customers in residential or semi-central areas; and Corner Bars are stylish, open-plan affairs offering fast service for quick consumption.

Last year, Illy announced that its line of concept bars would continue to expand under a new brand: Espressamente. Over a hundred cafes have opened everywhere from Rome, Munich and Oslo to Sydney, Tokyo and Shanghai, all under Italian design, led by architects Luca Trazzi, Claudio Silvestrin, and Paola Navone. Fast growth countries are France and China. The United States, home of the Banana Coconut Frappuccino, isn’t on the roll-out list. Yet. Its first careful forays are temporary ‘Illy Gallerias’ in New York City: SoHo last fall, and the Time Warner Center this fall.

Unlike Starbucks, Illy is focusing purely on high quality coffee. Forget being spaces, where consumers can park themselves with their MacBooks and Venti Lattes — Espressamente is all about a perfect shot of dark elixir. With rapid expansion plans, this means plenty of opportunity for franchise-minded entrepreneurs. It also shows that innovation never stops: next up, how about the inevitable uber premium coffee chain that will get away with charging 12 dollar for out of this world lattes? It’s all about upgrading the experience these days, not to mention upgraded margins. One to watch.

Website: https://www.illy.com
Contact: exportcs@illy.it

Business Week

Meals That Moms Can Almost Call Their Own

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Americans, pinched for time and increasingly uncomfortable in their kitchens, have been on a 50-year slide away from home cooking. Now, at almost 700 meal assembly centers around the country, families like the Robbinses prepare two weeks’ worth of dinners they can call their own with little more effort than it takes to buy a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad.

The centers are opening at a rate of about 40 a month, mostly in strip malls and office parks in the nation’s suburbs and smaller cities, and are projected to earn $270 million this year, according to the Easy Meal Prep Association, the industry’s trade group.

“It’s been keeping us from ordering pizza all the time,” Ms. Robbins said. “And you still feel like you’re cooking.”

The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction.

Super Suppers, which opened a year later in Fort Worth, is the largest chain, with 121 franchise stores and 77 more under construction. For people with few cooking skills, the centers keep things simple with a rotating menu of mostly stews and casseroles designed to be assembled in freezer bags or aluminum trays, then taken home to be baked or simmered in a single pot.

NYT