3 ways thinking like a chef can improve your business

Over the course of my legal and sustainability career at companies like Levi Strauss and Vital Farms, I’ve come to the belief that the stakeholder model is a fundamentally better way to do business. Unfortunately, this mindset is often confused as altruism. Spoiler alert: They are two vastly different concepts.

The stakeholder model is built on a core philosophy that if a business considers the impact to all its stakeholders in decision-making, the collective group will thrive. By helping to build your stakeholders’ resilience, you shore up your own. This does not mean sacrificing competitiveness or profits, as altruism suggests. On the contrary, I’ve seen firsthand how this model can give a business the right to win in the marketplace and drive outsize results—and so has chef Thomas Keller.

During Keller’s cameo in the season three finale of FX’s The Bear, the award-winning chef explains the stakeholder model in simple, relatable terms based on his experience running Michelin-starred restaurants like the French Laundry and growing his hospitality business for several decades.

Here are his three lessons for leaders who want to create long-term value for all their stakeholders and build a successful business:

1. Define your purpose

The stakeholder model begins with the idea that a business should have a higher purpose than just turning a profit. Chef Keller touches on this at the beginning of his appearance when he answers the question: Why do cooks cook?

“We cook to nurture people,” Keller says to the main character, Carmy (played by Jeremy Allen White), while teaching him how to truss a chicken.

A clear purpose can serve as a North Star that guides how your business operates. At Vital Farms, our purpose is to improve the lives of people, animals, and the planet through food. It helps to galvanize all our stakeholders around a common set of values and goals.

2. Identify your stakeholders

Keller then encourages the young chef to remember, “You’re nurturing yourself, you’re nurturing the team you’re cooking for, you’re nurturing our guests, you’re even nurturing our farmers, our fishermen, our foragers, and our gardeners who are bringing us all these wonderful ingredients.”

Here, he nails the importance of considering each stakeholder who touches your business’s operations. Your business alone does not simply drive value for you, the people purchasing your products, and your investors. Each of your stakeholders plays a valuable role in your long-term success.

3. Understand your impact

Acknowledging the value of understanding impact, Keller tells Carmy, “We get to really be part of people’s lives in significant ways. We can never forget that.”

Every stakeholder is made up of real people. Or, in Vital Farms’s case, we even consider the hens and cows that help produce our pasture-raised eggs and butter, and the planet as stakeholders.

Understanding the role your business plays in your stakeholders’ lives, and how your decisions impact each of them, is the key to building resilience. Engaging in two-way dialogue, sitting on the same side of the table to actively listen, and communicating consistently and transparently yields trust and meaningful relationships that can pay off in the long term. Coming from a legal background, this perspective was strikingly different from my early experience at law firms, where business was most often viewed as transactional, rather than relational.

Now what?

Keller closes his brief, impactful cameo by encouraging Carmy to “come in every single day and just try to do a little better than the day before. Just a little better. And that will compound over the years you’re here.”

I encourage leaders to leverage a stakeholder mindset in their own business. But as Keller suggests, approach this with a long view. The stakeholder model is more of a practice than a destination. It’s about focusing on continuous improvement every day, assessing business opportunities and risks over a longer time frame, and setting pragmatic goals. Leaders must prioritize progress over perfection.

If you want to read more about the stakeholder model, check out Conscious Capitalism by former Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, The Amare Wave by Moshe Engelberg, or Sreeni Kutam’s recent op-ed, which focuses on how businesses can drive value for employees, essential stakeholders in every business.

Joanne Bal is general counsel, corporate secretary, and head of impact at Vital Farms.