Work Clean

Imagine if, early in our schooling or career, we learned a system to organize ourselves and manage our work. We could carry this system with us no matter where we worked or what we did for a living—be we contractor or teacher, salesperson or doctor. And with this system we would have a code to guide our conduct; techniques to help us channel our energies, thoughts, and emotions productively; and the means to get through a tough workload and deliver with excellence.

Bits of that philosophy live in many professions and corporate cultures. Pieces of that system exist in any number of organizational methods.

But only one profession has developed a refined philosophy and comprehensive system of
how
to work. That profession is the culinary arts, and that philosophy and system is called
mise-en-place.

It's a French phrase translating as “put in place.” In the kitchen mise-en-place means to gather and arrange the ingredients and tools needed for cooking. But for many culinary professionals, the phrase connotes something deeper. Mise-en-place is a tradition of focus and discipline, a method of working and being. Many cooks call it a way of life.

What makes the professional kitchen's system so special? Over the past 2 centuries, chefs and cooks all over the world developed an informal regimen of values and behaviors in response to the unique demands and constraints of those kitchens. Because of those singular circumstances, chefs and cooks created an approach to work that has no equivalent.

What makes that approach applicable outside the kitchen? What wisdom could a chef impart, for example, to a lawyer, when
those two jobs are so different? The simple answer is that lawyers weren't forced to create that system. Chefs were. And the values and behaviors that spring from that chefly system aren't about
cooking,
but about achieving
excellence.
So many of us have convinced ourselves that because we are busy, we are working to the fullest extent of our abilities. But chefs know that there is a big difference between working hard and working
clean.

That mise-en-place might be useful outside the kitchen, and that the chef's philosophy of working might be as nourishing to our minds as the chef's food is to our bodies—those ideas are why this book exists.

This book teaches the lessons of mise-en-place in three courses. The first section,
The Power of Working Clean,
takes us straight to an exceptional kitchen where we'll spend a day discovering how mise-en-place works and how it helps its practitioners focus amid chaos. Then we'll spend a very different kind of day in an office, showing how we work without mise-en-place and how we often suffer for it. We'll see that mise-en-place applies to the office despite its differences from the kitchen. And we'll learn the three universal values of working clean: preparation, process, and presence.

The second course,
The Ingredients of Working Clean,
breaks mise-en-place into 10 distinct behaviors, each its own chapter. Each of the 10 chapters begins with a story, taking us into the life of a chef and how he or she learned that behavior. We then look at what chefs do and know that we might not. Then we suggest exercises and habits to integrate that behavior into our work lives outside the kitchen.

The third course,
Working Clean as a Way of Life,
converts those ingredients into a recipe for regular use. First, we reshape the values and behaviors of mise-en-place to fit our lives outside the kitchen and lay out the Work Clean system for organizing our workflow. Then we'll walk together through an ideal day of working clean, which weaves all the values and behaviors we've learned into an average workday and includes the book's most important
recommendation:
developing a regular practice of planning, a 30-minute Daily Meeze.

Working clean can transform your life, and this book gives you many useful ways to do just that.

As the global economy changes, our personal career trajectories become more like those of culinarians—nonlinear, itinerant, with plenty of false starts and surprises, successes and failures. Restaurants open and restaurants close, but because of mise-en-place, chefs and cooks bend where we might tend to break. A personal mise-en-place imparts a kind of learned resiliency that, if you practice it, can travel with you from workplace to workplace, from opportunity to opportunity. Mise-en-place can provide comfort as we move through those spaces because we understand that the responsibility for our success lies in our self-direction. Any door we walk through, we carry our own mise-en-place with us.

Some additional notes about the writing of
Work Clean:

■
I am a journalist, not a chef. I have never worked in a professional kitchen. I became intrigued by mise-en-place not because I was interested in cooking, but because, as an outsider, I saw in that system something beautiful and elegant that transcended kitchen work. Thus I approached this project in three ways. First, as a reporter, I have used the tools of my profession, interviewing more than 100 people from the culinary world, including chefs, line cooks, students, instructors, and restaurateurs, spending many months observing the kitchens in which they work. Second, as an executive and manager, I bring a career of experiences working in corporate, academic, and start-up environments; and I carry a professional history of both successes and instructive failures. Third, as a college professor and as a 2-decade-long teacher of a spiritual discipline, yoga, I recognize in the chef a kindred mission to educate, and I see many commonalities between the chef's philosophy, mise-en-place, and other spiritual traditions.

■
I worked to represent my sources accurately and to honor them, their aspirations, experience, and expertise. The stories, thoughts, feelings, or words of chefs and cooks come from reporting, not invention. For dialogue I use quotation marks to denote replication and italics to signify approximation.

■
I refer to mise-en-place above as a
philosophy
(what chefs believe) and a
system
(what chefs do). Later in this book I refer to it as an ethical
code.
Mise-en-place is all those things. Chefs themselves use the term to denote the array of ingredients at their station, their
setup
(e.g., “That idiot dropped sauce all over my mise-en-place!”), but also
the practice of preparing that setup
for themselves or other cooks (e.g., “If you can come in on time and get your mise-en-place done every day, then I'll let you cook.”), and
the mind state
of someone who knows exactly how to think, plan, and move (e.g., “She has good mise-en-place.”). Mise-en-place is all those things, too.

■
I do not use the words
chef
and
cook
interchangeably, even though some people do—and even though some chefs humbly call themselves “cooks” and some cooks proudly call themselves “chefs.” In this book a “chef” leads a staff of cooks, and “cooks” work for a chef. For simplicity, “chef” and “cook” include “baker.”

■
I wrote this book for the layman, but I hope that it will also be useful for current and future culinarians. My suggestions are mostly for the workplace, but they can also be used at home. And though I aim those suggestions at people who work in offices, mise-en-place applies to classrooms, hospitals, and other work settings.

■
To deconstruct mise-en-place, I drew from sources in the world of fine dining—not because mise-en-place doesn't exist in diners and chain restaurants, but because the philosophy is more exacting, evolved, explicit, and articulated in fine-dining kitchens.

■
I have interviewed chefs all over North America, but most of the chefs I've selected to profile are based in New York. I've done this in part to weave together the narratives of chefs who share the same teachers. In particular, the students of Jean-
Georges Vongerichten, Alfred Portale, and Charlie Palmer figure prominently in this book.