The Open Door

Most organizations are not failing. They are succeeding at the wrong objective.

They have optimized for efficiency, for throughput, for the metrics that can be counted, and in doing so they have quietly optimized away the thing that actually keeps people coming back: the experience of being genuinely received by another person.

This book is about that thing. It is about what genuine hospitality actually is, where it comes from, and what becomes possible when it is practiced not just in restaurants and hotels but in healthcare systems, financial services firms, permit offices, and cities.

The argument begins in a bar room in St. Petersburg, Florida, moves through the ancient traditions that made hospitality a sacred obligation, and arrives in the cities that have discovered, by different paths and with different tools, the same answer to the same question.

The question is the simplest one in hospitality.

Every person who walks through a door, whether that door opens onto a dining room or a permit office or a city park, is asking: Am I welcome here?