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Comment by vlz | Hacker News Reader

> … differentiation strategy of ‘enlightened hospitality’ through a synergistic set of human resource management practices involving three key practices: selection of employees based on emotional capabilities, respectful treatment of employees, and management through a simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviours benefiting customers.

So, hire nice people, be fair to them and encourage everybody to treat the customers fairly and kindly?

Maybe just being a good person is good for business?

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The OP also explains (partly here and partly in a previous post, linked in the story) how this is not a good strategy for most other restaurants which do not have a wide range of locations, from fast food to fine dining.

This exactly.

In fact, this is an article in of itself. With most jobs, employers are heavily incentivized to not make them incredibly enjoyable.

Everyone complains about their employers. Especially in technology.

However, tons of businesses emphatically do not have an incentive to create happy, enjoyable workplaces for their employees.

> ... encourage everybody to treat the customers fairly and kindly?

Do you believe that is an accurate summary of "management through a simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviours benefiting customers"?

The customers in the story had experience that were more than fair and kind. In fact, they are quite remarkable interactions. And the repeatability of remarkableness is not easy.

> just being a good person

You say it like this is something well-defined and easily achievable, but I am not sure it is.

Easily achievable, certainly not. Well defined, possibly.

Morals and ethics. Things which were heavily taught in earlier times, and which now have been replaced by STEM.

Someone is going to squwak that morals and ethics have been debated for millenium, thus certainly NOT well defined.

response: nice STEM thinking, which assumes a mathematical definition of "defined".

VS a morals and ethics definition, which says "here are the points of variance which go into moral decision making." Where a "definition" is not an answer, it is a framing of the debate.

Because moral decisions are always tradeoffs along different dimensions. And moral reasoning is about making judgement calls under uncertainty.

Moral philosophy, in practice, is not about finding the right answer but justifying the gut reaction of the practitioner. The utility of moral education wasn't to come up with better decisions, but to explain to young boys (or maybe girls, if they were educated) why the rules exist.

>Replaced by STEM

I cannot let this go because my Engineering undergrad is the one place I encountered a decent course on ethics; studying the subject is necessary for licensure. We didn't displace ethics, Philosophy departments got lost in their own rhetorical devices and don't talk about the 'how then should we live?' question enough to interest the general public.

Nah, that you would be weird in a service oriented industry.

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