Vaughn Tan’s The Uncertainty Mindset takes compellingly told stories from some of the world’s most progressive culinary institutions and distills them into insights concerning innovation management. After spending time at José Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup, at The Cooking Lab (creators of the cookbook Modernist Cuisine), at a leading restaurant going by the pseudonym Amaja, at the Fat Duck’s Experimental Kitchen, and at the Copenhagen-based MAD Foundation, Tan skillfully relates tales of their brain trusts in action as they solve problems, design dishes, develop techniques, and keep ahead of a relentless demand for the new. Tan, former Google employee and assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management, contrasts his tech background with the comparatively lo-fi approach taken by these kitchens, relating culinary anecdotes back to management theory, and deriving six insights ranging from the nature of roles within organizations to motivational methods to goal setting. On...
University of California Press