As you read the article below you should ask yourself if you’re doing the most that you can with the talents and resources at your disposal?
Dining in Iraq — from Made to Stick, by Heath and Heath, page 186-187
Army food is just about what you’d expect: bland, overcooked, and prepared in massive quantities. The dishes are not garnished with sprigs of parsley. The mess halls are essentially calorie factories, giving the troops the fuel they need to do their jobs. An old Army proverb says, “An Army travels on its stomach.”
The Pegasus chow hall, just outside the Baghdad airport, has developed a different reputation. At Pegasus, the prime rib is perfectly prepared. The fruit platter is a beautiful assortment of watermelon, kiwi fruit, and grapes. There are legends of soldiers driving to Pegasus from the Green Zone (the well-protected Americanized area of Baghdad), along one of the most treacherous roads in Iraq, just to eat a meal.
Floyd Lee, the man in charge of Pegasus, was retired from his twenty-five-year career as a Marine Corps and Army cook when the Iraq war began. He came out of retirement to take the job. “The good Lord gave me a second chance to feed soldiers,” he said. “I’ve waited for this job all my life, and here I am in Baghdad.”
Lee is well aware that being a soldier is relentlessly difficult. The soldiers often work eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. The threat of danger in Iraq is constant. Lee wants Pegasus to provide a respite from the turmoil. He’s clear about his leadership mission: “As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale.” Think about that: I am in charge of morale. In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy, Lee is going for Transcendence.
This vision manifests itself in hundreds of small actions taken by Lee’s staff on a daily basis. At Pegasus, the white walls of the typical mess hall are covered with sports banners. There are gold treatments on the windows, and green tablecloths with tassels. The harsh fluorescent lights have been replaced by ceiling fans with soft bulbs. The servers wear tall white chef’s hats.
The remarkable thing about Pegasus’s reputation for great food is that Pegasus works with exactly the same raw materials that everyone else does. Pegasus serves the same twenty-one-day Army menu as other dining halls. Its food comes from the same suppliers. It’s the attitude that makes the difference. A chef sorts through the daily fruit shipment, culling the bad grapes, selecting the best parts of the watermelon and kiwi, to prepare the perfect fruit tray. At night, the dessert table features five kinds of pie and three kinds of cake. The Sunday prime rib is marinated for two full days. A cook from New Orleans orders spices that are mailed to Iraq to enhance the entrees. A dessert chef describes her strawberry cake as “sexual and sensual” -two adjectives never before applied to Army food.
Lee realizes that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Improving morale involves creativity and experimentation and mastery. Serving food involves a ladle.
One of the soldiers who commute to Pegasus for Sunday dinner said, “The time you are in here, you forget you’re in Iraq.” Lee is tapping into Maslow’s forgotten categories-the Aesthetic, Learning, and Transcendence needs. In redefining the mission of his mess hall, he has inspired his co-workers to create an oasis in the desert.
