Inefficiencies are what make you special
37signals.com
37signals.com
Somehow I doubt that all, or even most, of elBulli's inefficiencies are helping it "succeed" - according to Wikipedia, it has operated at a loss for the last decade. The only reason it stays afloat is that Ferran Adrià leverages his status in the culinary world to bring in income from other sources. The restaurant is not a business, by any stretch of the imagination; it's a playground, maintained only as a labor of love, managed more for the pleasure of the owner than to make money. It's easy to create something fantastic if you don't have to think about costs or profit...
If you're one of the most highly respected Xs in the world, and can make a good living writing books and giving lectures, sure, go ahead, follow suit, create a fantasy world for yourself that you can finance based on your fame, and run it without fussing yourself over any difficult tradeoffs. Who knows, it might even help your real business by giving you more credentials in the industry, so it could be a net win.
That doesn't make it a business model for everyone else, though.
If you can't leverage your fame into a substantial paycheck, please don't try to emulate "businesses" that survive only based on cash infusions from the owners..
It's kind of like the New York Yankees. I've heard they lose money as a team because they rather inefficiently just throw large sums of money at top players to win the World Series. So much money even sell-out crowds and post season ticket sales don't cover costs. But the owner of the team ends up making money off of other Yankees-related properties.
I totally agree that the restaurant's existence probably helps Adrià make money, even if on the books it's a loss.
But I have no idea whether all of the strange things about it contribute to the success - it's only open a few months a year, only takes reservations on one day per year, doesn't try to push down the costs of supplies, etc. The simple fact that they book an entire season of reservations in one day indicates to me that regardless of the cost structure, they are not charging anywhere near what the market would be happy to support, and that's a business change that could be made without any reflection whatsoever on Adrià's talent, so it shouldn't have any impact on the second order benefits.
Artists of all sorts tend to be poor at running businesses because of an inability to figure out which inefficiencies actually help and which ones hurt. They stubbornly assume that all of them are important, and F-U if you don't like it. I don't see any particular business genius happening at elBulli, what I see is an artist that in this case can get away with being a diva because of a truly extreme case of talent that pays off in other ways. And again, that's fine, great, even, if you can do it. PG couldn't work on Arc at such a leisurely pace and with such a perfectionist attitude without other successes to support him while he "burns money" on it, and when everything finally comes out the other end, we may all be far better off for the fact that he is able to do it that way.
My main point, however, was that there's no lesson to be learned here unless you're already an industry unto yourself without your business. Very few people are lucky enough to be in that situation, and once you're there, you probably don't need any advice from anyone, as long as you don't really mess up, you'll always be able to pay the bills one way or another.