Are you a chef or a restaurateur?
Summary
Modern workplaces increasingly reward visibility (“restaurateur” roles) over deep work (“chef” roles), especially during turbulent times. AI-driven disruption and organisational thrashing favour those who are present and highly visible.
It’s time to reflect on your work style and your relationship with work. Do you seek rapid growth through visibility or satisfaction from depth? Make your choice deliberately.
I’ve been thinking about two kinds of employees — the chefs and the restaurateurs. Chefs are hands-on in the kitchen, cooking up a storm, maybe even dreaming up a new dish. They speak in the language of knives, ovens, pans, flames, condiments, spices, fats, proteins, carbs, fibre and tastes. They get a kick out of sending a well-plated dish that attracts a patron’s compliments, maybe even a doff of the hat from a food critic. Chefs are craftsmen. They’re deep workers.
In contrast, restaurateurs are businesspeople. They may have been chefs in a past life, but today they focus on keeping the restaurant profitable. Food quality, presentation, and even a Michelin star are all means to one end - profitability. So the restaurateur dabbles with margins, operating costs, taxes, hiring, salaries, meetings, marketing, and, yes, profits. If that sounds like a broad swathe of business areas, that’s what it is. Entrepreneurship can often stretch you a mile wide while keeping you only an inch deep. Running a business isn’t always conducive to deep work.
A day in the lives of a chef & and a restaurateur |
|
|---|---|
| Shreya, the chef (a deep-working techie) | Raj, the restaurateur (a senior manager) |
| Shreya logs in early, turns off notifications, and spends her morning untangling a complex architectural problem. By noon, she’s made significant progress but has missed a dozen Slack threads and three “quick check-ins.” Her code is elegant, but her work is largely invisible until a mid-year review. | Raj’s day is full of meetings, status updates, and cross-team calls. He connects clients with technical experts, gathers feedback, and aligns priorities across teams. Each afternoon, he compiles progress updates for leadership, troubleshoots roadblocks, and coordinates next steps. His visibility and responsiveness make him the go-to person for coordination, even though he rarely gets deep into technical work. |
An uncertain business is kryptonite for deep work.
I’m a chef, not a restaurateur. I get a kick out of deep work. Asynchronous collaboration is a means to that end. But like many other technology professionals, I find that we’re in a spell that’s not conducive to deep work. The combination of global uncertainty, poor governance, and the “AI revolution” has upended many businesses.
Consulting is in a time of upheaval. For years, technology and business consulting firms relied on a pyramid model of teams — lots of junior staff supporting a narrow apex of senior consultants and executives. Bill these armies by the hour, and laugh your way to the bank. AI makes a mockery of this model.
There was a time when Indian IT services companies’ revenue grew at 40-50% each year. Today, they’re experiencing single-digit growth, if at all: HCL and Persistent being notable exceptions.
India’s Nifty 50 is struggling too. Growth in profits after tax fell from 50% in Q2 of 2024 to 7% just six quarters later.
In short, it’s a bad time for most businesses, particularly knowledge work.
For-profit corporations exist to maximise shareholder value. When their businesses do poorly, as they are right now, they reach for solutions.
Could a new product do the trick?
Should they forge new partnerships?
Can exploring new geographies help?
Is the crisis big enough to change the business model?
These aren’t questions for chefs. These are restaurateur questions. And that’s fine, by the way. Can’t the restaurateurs handle the business, while chefs cook their hearts out? Except, no. That isn’t how things work during a crisis.
In the fog of war, the foot soldiers become invisible.
In a crisis, leaders like to summon an “all hands on deck” approach. Done well, this approach aligns people and everyone rows in the same direction. Done poorly, this approach leads to what we call “thrashing”.
A situation where an organisation, team, or leader constantly changes direction, priorities, or tasks, resulting in wasted effort, lost productivity, and employee frustration. It’s similar in concept to computer systems thrashing, where too many processes compete for limited memory resources, reducing overall performance.
This constant 'thrashing' is an environment where the chef struggles to cook. The ingredients keep changing, the power is unreliable, and the customers are shouting. But for the restaurateur, this chaos is an opportunity. It is a crisis to manage in full view.
Be in every meeting.
Be as visible as possible.
Be a known orchestrator of work.
Stay out of the kitchen and stay in the boardroom.
Suppose your employers recognise you as an ambitious restaurateur. In that case, you’re more likely to reap monetary rewards from pay hikes and promotions than if you continue to be a deep-working chef.
All this isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for depth in the knowledge working corporations of 2025-26. It’s just that there aren’t many rewards for deep work, except perhaps autonomy and work-life balance. It’s hard to care about the invisible chefs in the kitchens when the restaurant itself is at stake. Invisible people don’t get pay hikes or promotions. Presence beats depth.
“All my boss cares about is being in the office. Half of his effort is in pushing people to come to the office,” she said. Companies like TCS have even linked employees’ bonus eligibility to their attendance. - Quote from a report in The Ken
Chaos incentivises shallow work.
In his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport advises knowledge workers to ask their bosses, “What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?”. He reckons that at the entry level, this shallow work budget could range between 30-50% of one’s total work time. The more valuable your skills, the lower you can set your shallow work budget. Cal even suggests that an explicit conversation like this can provide you with the justification to decline meetings and distractions when you exceed the shallow work budget.
Such conversations are still possible. But a low, shallow work budget means less time in meetings, chats and emails. It means less visibility, and as I’ve argued, less visibility leads to poorer rewards.
In this time of thrashing, we also notice the incentive to fake depth through “AI workshop”. Here’s how HBR defines the workslop phenomenon.
“Content that appears polished but lacks real substance, offloading cognitive labour onto coworkers.”
BetterUp’s research about workslop is damning. We’re kicking AI cans down the collaboration road. A massive number of us receive and share workslop every day, which in turn creates unnecessary, avoidable work for the entire corporation. Indeed, if a boss sends you such work, it’s hard to critique it. You’d rather bite the bullet and get on with the cleanup job.
40%
Percentage of US desk workers who received workslop in August 2025
2 hrs
Average time it takes to resolve each workslop incident
$186
Monthly cost per employee caused by these incidents
$9M
Annual cost for a 10,000-person company.
* Insights are based on an online survey of 1,150 full-time U.S. desk workers conducted in September 2025 by BetterUp in partnership with the Stanford Social Media Lab.
So what’s the incentive for deep work anymore? Why wouldn’t someone schmooze in meetings and send out workslop instead of being the sorry fool who cleans up after? It seems that depth is only for the foot soldiers. Rewards are for generals or even pretend-generals.
Hold on for just a bit more, though. If you prefer being a chef, you’ve got to ask yourself what you expect from your employment contract. If you want big pay hikes and promotions, I fear that deep work may not bring you those rewards in the next few quarters. For some of us, that’s OK.
Perhaps work-life balance is dearer to us than a fancy job title.
Maybe we prize our autonomy and mental health more than the rewards of visibility.
Or maybe we enjoy an intellectual struggle more than we appreciate the business hustle.
Your move: play for visibility or depth?
As we close 2025 and look ahead to 2026, it’s worth reexamining the part work plays in our lives and deciding if we want to be chefs or restaurateurs. If you choose to be a chef, accept the slow growth that comes with that choice. If you decide to be a restaurateur, though, be the restaurateur who makes a chef’s work easier. Not the one that creates busywork. The kitchens of knowledge work need excellent restaurateurs to run them profitably. More than ever before, I’d add!