THE GORDON RAMSAY EXPERIMENT

The Five-Minute Convincer

By Hiran de Silva

Imagine Gordon Ramsay has just hired you.

And if you’ve ever seen Gordon Ramsay on television, you’ll know one thing.

He is extremely particular about the standard of work his staff deliver.

So…

No pressure.

Gordon has a new client.

It is a large company that holds a special lunch every Friday for 100 of its smartest employees.

They call it…

The 100 Club.

And Gordon has put you in charge of organising the food.

Here is your mission.

Every Monday morning, Gordon gives you the menu for Friday.

There are three starters.

Three main courses.

And three desserts.

He also gives you a workbook containing the ingredients required to make each dish for one person.

Your job is to tell the 100 employees what is on the menu, collect their choices, and calculate exactly what Gordon needs to buy.

The deadline for employees to make their selections is…

6 p.m. Wednesday.

And at exactly…

7 p.m. Wednesday…

you must send the grocery store the complete shopping list.

That gives you one hour.

And Gordon Ramsay is waiting.

So here is the challenge.

How would you design the spreadsheet process?

You can pause the video here.

Think about it.

You have Excel.

You have 100 people.

You have their menu selections to collect.

And you have one hour to turn those selections into an accurate grocery order.

What would you build?

[PAUSE]

Got your answer?

Good.

Because when this challenge is given to Excel users, something very interesting happens.

Around 99% come up with variations of essentially the same solution.

Send something out.

Perhaps a spreadsheet.

Perhaps an email.

Perhaps a form.

Collect 100 responses.

Bring the information together.

Then use Excel formulas, Power Query, dynamic arrays, macros, or some other clever technique to process it.

Some solutions are much more sophisticated than others.

But fundamentally, they all involve information being sent out…

information coming back…

and somebody having to collect and process it.

Now let me show you what the other 1% do.

On Monday morning, Gordon tells you this week’s nine dishes.

You open your spreadsheet.

You select those nine dishes.

And then…

you close the workbook.

Your work is done.

Meanwhile, the 100 members of the 100 Club already have their own spreadsheet.

They open it.

And there, as if by magic, are this week’s menu choices.

Three starters.

Three main courses.

Three desserts.

Each employee makes three selections.

Starter.

Main course.

Dessert.

Then they close their workbook.

Their work is done.

Nobody sends you a spreadsheet.

Nobody sends you an email.

Nobody consolidates anything.

Nothing is copied and pasted.

Nothing is attached.

Nothing is chased.

Wednesday arrives.

At 6 p.m., you open your workbook.

Every selection from all 100 employees is already there.

You can see precisely who has ordered what.

But you don’t even need to process it.

You click on the Grocery Shopping List.

And there it is.

The complete shopping list Gordon needs.

Every ingredient.

Every quantity.

Calculated from the selections of all 100 people.

And if Gordon asks…

Are you sure?

You can show him.

There is a complete audit trail showing every person, every dish they selected, and the ingredients generated by that selection.

So compare the two approaches.

In the 99% solution, spreadsheets, emails or responses are flying around the organisation and somebody has to bring everything together.

In the 1% solution…

no spreadsheets are sent.

No spreadsheets are received.

Everyone involved has only a few clicks to make.

You were given an hour.

Your actual workload?

Less than a minute.

And this is where the Gordon Ramsay Experiment becomes interesting.

Because employers were shown the two approaches and asked a very simple question.

If you were recruiting someone for work involving Excel and spreadsheets…

which group would you recruit from?

The 99%?

Or the 1%?

The answer was unanimous.

The 1%.

Then the Excel users themselves were asked:

Which group do you think employers would prefer to recruit from?

They gave exactly the same answer.

The 1%.

And then something even more interesting happened.

Employers started asking:

Where do we find people who know how to do this?

Because these aren’t merely people who know more Excel features.

They think differently about the problem.

They don’t just make the existing process faster.

They redesign the process.

And employers said that if they could find people capable of doing that, they would pay over the odds to recruit them…

and pay over the odds to keep them.

That is the point of the Gordon Ramsay Experiment.

The difference between the 99% and the 1% isn’t necessarily how much Excel they know.

It is knowing what Excel can be made to do.

And once you understand that…

the question changes.

It is no longer:

How good are you at Excel?

The question becomes:

Which side of the Gordon Ramsay Experiment are you on?