Inside Danny Meyer’s promote-from-within culture: 80% of his GMs started as hourly staff

In today’s CEO Daily: What’s behind Danny Meyer’s optimism?

The big leadership story: The Fortune 500 companies making the most progress on adopting and scaling AI.

The markets: Mixed as Treasury yield continue their upward march.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Danny Meyer is often accused of being an optimist. “I’m just as tired as anyone I know of uncertainty, cynicism, negativity, skepticism, bad news,” the founder and executive chairman of Union Square Hospitality Group told me yesterday. He can’t fix the tax code or the tariffs, though he did apologize to Canada for the latter after detecting my accent. What he can control is the question he starts every day with, and the title of his book that goes on sale today: What Could Possibly Go Right?

The last time Meyer wrote a book was 20 years ago, when he published Setting the Table, which popularized the idea of “enlightened hospitality” that put employees first and investors fifth (in a tier of five). The book was influential but, Meyer says, incomplete. “I had never scaled anything. I had no experience having a second version of anything, never mind over 700 versions of something like Shake Shack,” he said. “I had also never closed a restaurant.”

In fact, Meyer’s failures and how he dealt with them while continuing to grow are at the heart of his new book. And there’s plenty of good advice from the front lines of a 41-year career that’s spawned fine-dining icons like Gramercy Tavern, The........

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