Is Corporate Kitchen a recipe for success?

BOULDER — It was President Harry S. Truman who was fond of quipping: “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

Cooking School of the Rockies has turned that famous saying on its head with its new Corporate Kitchen workshop. Joan Brett, the school’s director, reckons people who spend time together in the kitchen may be able to stand the heat a whole lot better. Brett’s school is offering the workshop in conjunction with Destra Consulting Group.

This day-long, team-building exercise takes place not in the mountains, forests or some other challenging outdoor environment: Instead, it all happens amid the pots and pans of the school’s kitchen on South Broadway.

Although the program is still new, Brett is convinced it’s a recipe for success. She says it’s unique in Colorado. Similar programs exist only in New York and California’s Napa Valley, Brett believes.

Corporate Kitchen costs $4,500 and works by employing many of the keys to

success in business — things like planning, time management, good communication, teamwork and risk taking — in the preparation and cooking of a three-course meal.

In just eight hours the corporate group, ideally no bigger than a dozen, will progress from confronting a table laden with ingredients to a final celebration dessert and a feeling of real accomplishment, says Brett.

“It’s fun, but there are valuable lessons to be learned, both corporate and culinary,” she said. “Besides the team-building benefits, at the end of the day participants will be taking home many additional cooking skills.”

Along the way, they will have been able to turn to her for professional advice and assistance while being closely observed by an expert from Destra Consulting and pausing several times for group debriefs and discussion.

That observer is likely to be David Hannegan, an expert in leadership development and building high-performance teams, who sees Corporate Kitchen as an ideal vehicle for achieving those goals.

“Just having fun together, getting out of the office and doing something different is a valuable experience,” Hannegan said. “At the same time how people operate during this exercise tends to reflect how they typically work together. This program is a wonderful way for people to be “playfully serious.”

It’s not all play, like a game of golf, yet it’s more accessible and less intimidating than, say, Outward Bound, an outdoor leadership class.

“It’s also more gender-neutral than many such exercises. and it equally puts people in and out of their comfort zones. I would say Corporate Kitchen really occupies some nice middle ground,” Hannegan said.

This month the Boulder Chamber of Commerce board of directors was due in the kitchen. But, as the proverb says, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the first to taste this particular dish were six women from brokerage firm Charles Schwab.

Group members — from Orlando, Phoenix, Indianapolis and Colorado — were brought together by Denver-based director of human resources, Nancy Rudzek.

“Some of us didn’t even know each other, so it was firstly a wonderful opportunity to meet and secondly a great way to look at how well we could work together,” she said.

“To start with we were given the ingredients for soup but no recipe. So together we had to create our soup, which we called “Boulder Confusion.” This was followed by the main course where we had to follow a very long and involved recipe.

“Working as a team this way was a great experience, a lot of fun and not

at all threatening. We had thought of white water rafting, but some people felt a bit intimidated by that idea.”

Cooking School of the Rockies is the third successful career venture for Brett, who started out as a French teacher and then, between 1976 and 1991, practiced in Boulder as an attorney.

At that time, cooking, though Brett’s passion, was still only an enjoyable hobby. But after attending a one-week cooking school in New York she knew what she wanted to do next: run her own school in Colorado.

Brett returned to train at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School, served her own apprenticeship one day a week at the former Small Wonder Cafe in Boulder and, on Labor Day 1991, began offering a few classes from her home that proved an instant success.

The following year she opened the present school at Table Mesa. Since then, more than 4,000 people have graduated from the basic techniques course, which she created and continues to teach.

Today, the school boasts two state-of-the-art kitchens and a retail store, employs nine full-time staff, has 11,000 clients on its books (from beginners to advanced) and attracts foodies from all around America — and the world — with cooking vacations and a host of other

popular courses.

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