And you may ask yourself, well how did I get here? – David Byrne

Why hospitality…how did I get here?

I am pretty certain that hospitality chose me. Some of my earliest happy memories are of food. My grandmother took me with her as a little kid to the Italian Market on 9th Street in South Philly. Everything had it’s own shop: meat, fish, cheese, bread, vegetables, fruit, pastries. She knew every shopkeeper personally, would never think to buy food from someone she didn’t know. And she’d never go in and just buy something, she’d stay and talk. I absorbed the lessons, food was personal.  Hospitality was a way of living, a way of caring for and about the people around you.

So it made sense that my first jobs were with food, it was what I knew and what I loved. I continued to work in food through college and upon graduation for some reason decided that I needed to get a “real” job. Funny even that detour didn’t waver much from hospitality – though I was doing transit planning, the focus was helping those with mobility challenges, again that central theme of hospitality in care for others. After five years of this I returned to where I belonged.

This so far is all foundational.

Then grad school at Cornell changed everything. Something very unexpected happened to me there. I learned to see hospitality through a much broader prism, as an ethos capable of transforming for the better anyone and any enterprise. That warm world view is baked into every one of my projects, and that’s how I got to Hospitality as Strategy and to Hospitality Design Thinking^®.

And that’s how I think I got here…oh and to this day I make it a point to personally get to know the people I buy my food from, and I always stay and talk.

– John Sergi