Making Room to Notice: "Unreasonable Hospitality" in Higher Education
How disciplined systems and human attentiveness together create institutions where people truly feel seen and valued.
The larger and more complex an organization becomes, the more it tends to rely on systems that make recurring work predictable. We standardize. We automate. We build processes that can be replicated, measured, and scaled. Much of leadership is, quite rightly, committed to this work. Realistically, institutions cannot fulfill ambitious and meaningful mission-driven work without discipline, sound systems and processes, and responsible stewardship.
Lately, though, I have been thinking a great deal about what all that discipline is meant to make possible. Our university president assigns what he affectionately calls “dessert” each month. These are books, articles, videos, and other resources intended to help us think, stretch, and learn together as leaders. Regrettably, none of these desserts have ever included whipped cream.
One of those desserts was Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality. The book is an impressive and inspiring tale of how Guidara’s leadership at Eleven Madison Park helped transform it into the BEST restaurant in the world. It is a story about excellence, certainly, but not excellence as polish or performance alone. Eleven Madison Park’s success came from combining extraordinary operational discipline with an even more extraordinary attentiveness to people, both those being served and those doing the serving.
To say this book was transformative for me as a leader is an understatement. It gave language, structure, and evidence to instincts I already held about care, culture, and service, while also challenging me to think much more deliberately about the experiences we create in the work we do. Considering people has always come naturally to me. I am a deep empath, sometimes to a fault, and my instinct is almost always to begin with care. Balancing that instinct with sustainability and operational discipline is a newer leadership muscle for me, and one I am still working to build.
One of Guidara’s ideas that has stayed with me is his 95/5 principle. His premise is that leaders should manage 95 percent of their resources with great discipline so they preserve the freedom to use the remaining 5 percent in ways that may initially seem “unreasonable.” At Eleven Madison Park, that 5 percent created opportunities to surprise people, personalize an experience, or respond meaningfully to something a member of the team had noticed.
At National University, that principle became tangible for me when we flew one of our students from the East Coast to San Diego so she could attend our inaugural student art exhibition and see her own creative work displayed alongside that of her peers. She had never been on an airplane. We could have held the exhibition without her in-person presence, but it mattered deeply to the experience we wanted to create. I hope that weekend allowed her to feel not only recognized as an artist, but also seen, valued, and fully part of the academic community her work had helped bring to life.
As someone who has been accused, often lovingly, of being a little “extra,” I first understood 95/5 as permission to create memorable moments. Over time, however, I have come to see 95/5 as something more consequential. It is also a way of thinking about organizational design.
Of course, the 95 percent matters. Students, faculty, and staff need institutions to be consistent, dependable, and capable of operating at scale. But as we strengthen the systems designed to serve many, we cannot lose the time, flexibility, and attentiveness needed to respond to the individual person in front of us.
Our students do not enter our university as standardized cases. They arrive with histories, responsibilities, ambitions, complications, and needs that do not always correspond neatly with the processes we have built. When our systems leave no margin, they may still be efficient, but they leave very little room to notice when someone needs something the standard response cannot provide.
For me, that margin is the real value of the 5 percent. It may look like the time for one more conversation, the freedom to solve a problem that falls between departmental boundaries, or the discretion to recognize that a technically correct answer may still not be a helpful one. It does not require extravagance. Often, it simply requires attention.
This is particularly important in higher education because students entrust us with much more than a transaction. They invest their time, resources, aspirations, and, in many cases, tremendous personal and family sacrifice. Many are simultaneously employees, parents, caregivers, military service members, community leaders, and so many other things. At National University, we call them ANDers because “student” is never their only identity. Their educational experience cannot and should not be separated from the complexity of the lives in which that education is taking place.
We often say that we design education for the students we serve. Unreasonable Hospitality has pressed me to consider what that claim looks like when it moves beyond words on a page. It should be visible in our academic calendars, course structures, communications, technologies, policies, and support systems. It should also be visible in the ordinary interactions through which students decide whether an institution truly sees them. None of this requires us to lower academic expectations. Access and hospitality are not the opposites of rigor and excellence. They can and should coexist. A course can be intellectually demanding while also being thoughtfully designed. A policy can be firm and communicated with dignity. A student can be held accountable while still understanding that the institution is invested in their success. We should remain uncompromising about what students need to learn, while being far more imaginative about how we help them reach that learning.
That distinction matters because not every obstacle a student encounters is evidence of academic rigor. Some obstacles are simply inherited friction, processes, or conventions that have remained in place long after we have forgotten why they exist. Thoughtful hospitality asks us to distinguish between productive challenge, which is central to education, and unnecessary difficulty, which may only test a student’s ability to navigate the institution.
Guidara’s work also helped me think differently about the people responsible for creating these experiences. Eleven Madison Park did not become exceptional because one leader personally orchestrated every moment of hospitality. It became exceptional because Guidara cultivated a culture in which people were trusted to notice, empowered to act, and supported in exercising judgment.
This connects strongly with another book that has influenced my leadership, Garry Ridge’s Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It. Ridge writes candidly about the value of caring for people and the cultures that become possible when employees feel known, trusted, and genuinely valued. Both books challenge the assumption that care is somehow separate from performance. We often do our most creative and committed work when we know that we matter to the people alongside us.
We cannot ask faculty and staff to create experiences of belonging for students while allowing those same employees to feel invisible within the institution. The experience of the people doing the work inevitably becomes part of the experience of those they serve. That does not mean abandoning accountability or standards. It means pairing clarity with care, and structure with trust. It means creating enough room for people to bring their humanity, creativity, and professional judgment to the work rather than reducing every interaction to a script.
I was so affected by Unreasonable Hospitality that I gave a copy to every faculty and staff member in my school as a commencement gift a year ago. Commencement is our most visible celebration of educational achievement, but it rests upon hundreds of much quieter moments that happen along the way. A faculty member notices a shift in student engagement. A staff member makes the warm handoff. A colleague remembers what matters. These small acts may never directly appear on a dashboard, but they shape whether students experience an institution as a system or a community.
As artificial intelligence and automation become increasingly woven into our work, I keep returning to a simple question: What will we do with the capacity these tools create? Technology can help us remove friction, recognize patterns, and respond more quickly. I hope we use those efficiencies not simply to process more, but to create more room to listen, notice, connect, and care.
Unreasonable hospitality in higher education is not about endless grand gestures or saying yes to every request. It is certainly not about asking already committed faculty and staff to exhaust themselves in service of others. It is about designing institutions where care is not accidental or dependent on a few extraordinary people. When a student’s wonderfully complicated life does not fit neatly within one of our processes, there should still be room for someone to respond with judgment, generosity, and humanity.
Although I have experienced this most directly in higher education, I do not think the lesson belongs to education alone. Whether we are designing technology, leading a research team, caring for patients, building a business, or serving a community, people experience our values most clearly in the moments when the standard process is not quite enough. When we manage the 95 percent with discipline, the remaining 5 percent gives us room to respond with judgment, creativity, and “unreasonable hospitality.” In any sector, that is where our mission becomes something people can actually feel.
