(This is an excerpt from the first chapter of my book, "Building Software Platforms." I was fascinated by this story and very quickly pattern-matched it to the software industry to see how we could learn from one of the master innovators of our time)
Reinventing yourself
Funnily enough, this story is not about technology but gastronomy. Concretely speaking, it is about a restaurant, not just any, but the best restaurant of all time, El Bulli. Located in Roses (a charm-filled town in the Spanish Costa Brava), the place had already been awarded one Michelin star a couple of years before chef Ferran Adrià joined the staff in 1984. With Ferran's and his brother Albert's ideas, the restaurant's popularity rocketed thanks to the many innovations they brought into the cuisine, obtaining two additional Michelin stars in 1990 and 1997.
With Adrià already at the front of the team, during the late 90s, El Bulli helped put the new Spanish gastronomy on the map and changed the status quo of the gastronomic industry with new technologies such as the kitchen siphon and new techniques such as deconstructions. Adrià's Molecular Gastronomy concept was disruptive enough to put his restaurant in a prominent position in an already competitive list dominated by French chefs with their Nouvelle Cuisine.
And this is when the story starts to get interesting.
In 1998, and with El Bulli already enjoying a leading position among the best places in the world, Adrià took a decision that surprised the entire gastronomic industry (and the whole world). As he expressed in many interviews, he felt exasperated about going from congress to congress and watching other chefs sharing the results of their ideas while keeping the secrets, and most importantly, the recipes to themselves. The intensity of how those colleagues guarded their creations triggered Adrià's creativity.
As a professional chef, Adrià was committed to improving continuously and changing the world's perception of this type of cuisine as a banal activity carried out by many pompous elitists who were only interested in recognition. He had an alternative vision beyond making El Bulli a lucrative restaurant and another mission rather than just running a business. He wanted to make a positive impact on people's lives through the experience of having food and, as a consequence, leave a legacy. At one of those conferences, in San Sebastián, he proclaimed one of his most famous statements that kickstarted a whole movement within the industry:
"The time of keeping recipes in the drawer is over."
As he said that, he started sharing his famous recipes and techniques publicly, congress after congress. Yes, precisely, this is what you are thinking. Adrià open-sourced El Bulli's recipes to get better as he understood that the best way to protect an idea is by sharing it immediately. The restaurant was good, but they wanted to become the best. They quickly recognized that the only way of getting there was by accelerating innovation and sharing knowledge with the community to compete in identical product and practice conditions. By releasing their secrets in the open, they transformed their technologies and techniques into a quasi-industry standard adopted by many other restaurants across the planet that were pursuing the same kind of success.
What happened was that the gastronomic industry was starting to compete in a commoditized market. Molecular gastronomy technologies and techniques at their genesis in the early 90s became industrialized by the early 2000s and accessible by all kinds of restaurants. Molecular gastronomy became so popular and handy that all good restaurants included several dishes using this technique in their primary menu. If we look at our kitchens now in the 2020s, we will likely find some sophisticated pieces of equipment, such as siphons, in a shameless attempt to impress our friends with taco foam the next time they come and visit us for dinner.
What happened after this master move won't surprise you.
Adrià and his team outperformed themselves to the extent that Restaurant magazine awarded El Bulli the best restaurant in the world from a global list of 50 places in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, setting a record high of five times. Again, they were competing in a highly commoditized market where most restaurants used the same products and techniques based on Molecular Gastronomy. Not surprisingly, El Bulli's chefs were again leading in a very competitive market and differentiating themselves from their competitors by using their techniques to produce exclusive and unique dishes. This approach helped Adrià set a new best practice in the gastronomy industry.
However, little did he know that they were about to die of success except for one person: the visionary chef.
Adrià started to witness the first signals of burnout in his increasingly mature team. More importantly, he was very frustrated that he had to reject customer after customer because the restaurant's waiting list had extended for months (and even years) of reservations. The team even had to cancel the lunchtime service to focus on one service per day at dinnertime, which raised many questions and concerns to the management team, severely impacting El Bulli's revenue. Adrià estimated that the team couldn't physically and mentally make it beyond 2012, so in an unexpected anticipation maneuver, he closed the restaurant in July 2011.
Although El Bulli as a restaurant has closed forever, its core concept and Adrià's vision didn't stop there. Right after he announced that the most iconic restaurant in modern history was closing at its peak, the Spanish chef revealed the details about how he wanted to build his legacy. Therefore, in the spirit of the experimentation and innovation that led El Bulli to become the number one restaurant, Adrià's next project consisted of spinning up a foundation to foster gastronomy innovation, learning, and sharing experiences with the community. The new entity, known as El Bulli Foundation, aims to create and deliver new culinary experiences for its guests.
When this book was written, all we knew was that this master chef wanted to persevere in realizing his vision of leaving a legacy to the world and disrupting the gastronomy industry once again. Indeed, Adrià and his team are closing the cycle of evolution, making the pendulum swing back to genesis to reinvent themselves, formulate uncertain things again, work with poorly understood concepts, and start to compete in an undefined market. They don't love failure at this new stage, but they tolerate the process to create innovations that will help them differentiate with unique gastronomy products in the future. This idea is presented in the following Wardley map:
The lesson for the software industry
There is a hidden lesson for the software industry despite this story's evident survivorship bias and the manifestation of privilege that entails closing a wealthy business at its peak.
We are moving toward a world where technology is so abundant that companies must quickly evolve from product to service differentiation. To make the jump, many of these companies also need to understand that the only way to improve a product is to transform it into an industry standard. In technology, that could happen by open-sourcing it.
After that, companies compete in a services market that fosters innovation to gain new competitive advantages. It took El Bulli, a company in the gastronomy business, over three decades to preserve a leading position by going through this magical cycle, which technology companies are doing in a decade or less. This is how fast technology goes, so be prepared for a bumpy ride.