What Information Management Can Learn from Unreasonable Hospitality

I recently finished Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, the restaurateur behind Eleven Madison Park. On the surface, it's a book about running a successful restaurant business. But really, it's about what happens when you commit to making people feel seen, valued, and cared for. Those lessons apply across sectors.

For information management professionals, I think the book points to something we don't talk about enough: the need to be intentional. Intentional about the work we do. Intentional about the teams we build to do that work. And intentional about how we communicate our value.

Guidara makes a distinction between service and hospitality that stuck with me: "Black and white means you're doing your job with competence and efficiency; color means you make people feel great about the job you're doing for them" (Chapter 1, p. 5).

Sound familiar? We can build the most elegant taxonomy, implement flawless retention schedules, or deploy the most sophisticated AI tools. That's the black and white. But if our stakeholders don't feel supported, heard, or enabled by what we do, we've missed something essential. Information professionals provide services, but it's our intentionality in how those services feel when being used that makes what we do so valuable.

Excellence Through Intentionality

One of Guidara's core themes is intentionality. Every decision matters, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane. For those of us in information management, this resonates deeply. We're often stretched thin across compliance, governance, migration projects, user support, and now AI data readiness.

Here's the insight I took away: we need to find balance where we decide that what we're doing is enough, but we can determine where we want to be excellent by focusing on those areas that most benefit and impact others.

Where can we best direct our attention to enable someone else's excellence?

That's the key question and where we can extend unreasonable hospitality in an IM context. Our work creates the conditions for everyone else to succeed. Clean data, findable information, trustworthy records. None of it is glamorous, but it enables the business to move faster, make better decisions, and trust what they're working with.

Building Teams with Care

That intentionality extends to how we build our teams.

Guidara writes extensively about hiring and team development. He advocates for building teams intentionally, with care, even if that sometimes means letting people go. As organizations shift toward AI-readiness and new data governance requirements, this hits home. Some team members will adapt and grow. Others won't. That's not a failure. It's a reality that requires honest, compassionate leadership.

He also says something I want to put on a poster: "Sometimes the best time to promote people is before they are ready. So long as they are hungry, they will work even harder to prove that you made the right decision" (Chapter 19, p. 233).

There aren't enough experienced information governance professionals to meet demand right now, especially with AI accelerating everything. We need to invest in developing people faster. Give them stretch assignments. Trust them with responsibility before they feel "ready."

And if you want to help your team get ready faster, AIIM's library of on-demand courses can help.

The Nobility of What We Do

And then there's how we talk about ourselves.

Guidara talks about the nobility of service and how important it is to name for ourselves that the work we do matters. I think we need more of that in information management.

Our industry is shifting. For decades, we've been defined by compliance. Keep the right records. Dispose of the rest. Stay out of trouble. That work still matters, but it's no longer the whole story. Today, we're focused on how we drive better business outcomes. In the AI era, we are the utility players capable of implementing successful AI governance and readying data for AI.

We are more than guardians. We ensure AI integrity and ethics. We create accessibility to data and help map its meaning. We provide critical human oversight for automated workflows. We help execute strategy and ensure success.

That's noble work. And if we want to attract the next generation of information professionals, we need to talk about it that way. We don't just manage documents or enforce retention policies. We facilitate and manage data so organizations can move fast, break less, and achieve better business outcomes.

Let's Keep the Conversation Going

If ideas like "unreasonable hospitality" resonate with you, you might be interested in AIIM's biggest event of the year: the AI+IM Global Summit in Baltimore, April 28-30. The Summit is devoted to practical implementation of AI governance and data readiness, built specifically for information professionals. This is where your team can gain the skills to manage, organize, and leverage your organization's data for AI. Our highly interactive, cohort-based learning program is capped at 400 people, so register soon Learn more and register.