The pastry that changed my life and a new stage for business

I recently sampled a kouign aman made by my friend Romina, who is a pastry chef superstar and an amazing person. Her kouign aman immediately became my favorite pastry. Too bad she lives two thousand miles away.

Romina was in NYC recently and worked as a stagaire at a couple of restaurants here. The concept behind the stage is that a chef will work in another’s kitchen for a day or so in order to get exposure to other techniques or cuisines. Restaurants are certainly businesses and I began to imagine whether non-food business managers could offer the same courtesy to colleagues from other organizations.

What would work the same:
- The stagaire agrees to respect specific innovations of the organization itself
- The stagaire actively contributes to the new organization
- The stagaire quickly learns and appreciates what could apply to his/her own business back home

What would work differently:
- The timeframe would need to be longer. A one-day stage in an office probably wouldn’t suffice, whereas a one-day stage in a restaurant would
- While anyone in an organization as a stagaire would be trusted by the owner/manager, their presence may be viewed differently by compliance organizations and other employees. Security issues would need to be addressed
- In non-food businesses, the stagaire may be better off observing, sitting in on meetings and discussing with the manager at day’s end

In a sense, the traditional management consultant is something of a reverse stagaire, going into a new organization for a time to bring in ideas and processes from outside and not necessarily having the relevance to apply what he/she sees on the client side to the consultancy. Other than consultants, typical business stage-like exchanges include the formal (case studies, articles, best practices) and the informal (talking business outside of work). It’s important to do this, no matter what business you’re in.