I hate to count stuff almost as much as I hate to wash dishes. There. I said it. I have never understood the operator who gets excited about inventory night, and I have certainly never met a chef who looked at a stack of count sheets and said, 'This is why I got into the business.' Counting is tedious. It interrupts the part of the job that feels productive. It makes you crawl around storerooms, open boxes, move cases, read labels, estimate partial containers, and discover things you wish you had not found.

And even though I hate it, I do it. Because there is no other honest way to know what is really in your walk-in, freezer, dry store, beverage cage, or prep refrigerator. Memory is useful. Experience is useful. Knowing your business is useful. None of those things is inventory.

I learned that lesson very early. I was nineteen and had about five years in foodservice when I went through the interview process with PepsiCo. The company I had grown up with culinarily was, in my view, headed toward a slow and painful end. I had gotten close to several upper-management people at Pizza Hut, which at the time was on a moon-shot growth trajectory, and they wanted me to consider a district-manager path. I was hesitant, but I entered the process. It was eye-opening.

The organization I came from was small potatoes compared with these guys. But when it came to some management-control disciplines, I was surprised to discover that we were light-years ahead. During a tour of one operating unit, I asked the manager about ordering difficulties. I had already heard from plenty of managers that there were problems, and with senior people standing there I wanted to hear what the actual operating issue was.