By: Michael Beck
When a friend of mine and industry veteran, Joseph Szala, asked me to read his new book, I did something completely out of character. I actually read it. Cover to cover. Since I was already making that kind of commitment, it felt irresponsible not to bring you along. What follows is my take on Joseph’s work, a book loaded with hard earned insight, clear thinking, and the kind of horse sense you only develop after enough real-world scars to stop romanticizing theory.
There is a moment in every restaurant brand’s life when leadership gathers in a room, looks at a dashboard, and says something like, “We’re doing everything right.”
This is usually said while everything is slowly catching fire in a very organized way.
Quiet Killers is the book you read when the fire alarm has been disabled because it was “going off too often.”
Joseph Szala does not burst through the wall yelling. He calmly points at the smoke stains and explains, in unnerving detail, how they got there. The effect is less motivational speech and more well-reasoned intervention where everyone slowly realizes the problem has been present for years and has been receiving performance bonuses.
The book opens by confronting the marketing funnel, a model that assumes guests behave like courteous Victorian shoppers with free time and emotional availability. According to the funnel, guests arrive curious, linger thoughtfully, and politely move toward purchase after consuming sufficient messaging. According to reality, guests arrive hungry, late, and holding their phone like a weapon. Designing modern restaurant experiences around persuasion rather than intent has produced websites and apps that feel like escape rooms built by people who hate lunch.
Next comes the Bias Loop, which explains why leadership teams across the industry keep copying the largest brands in the room as if size were contagious. Survivorship bias whispers, “They’re successful, do what they do.” Confirmation bias follows up with, “Ignore anything that suggests this is a terrible idea.” This is how a twelve location brand ends up with a tech stack that requires three departments, a vendor summit, and a minor sacrifice to operate. Confidence remains high throughout.
Then we arrive at the Convenience Trap, a place everyone has visited, and no one remembers booking. This is where temporary decisions take on long term leases. Shortcuts develop roots. Workarounds gain seniority. Technology selected because it was fast to install slowly becomes the brand’s personality. Eventually no one knows why things are the way they are, only that changing them would be “too disruptive,” which is corporate for “we have made a terrible nest.”
Finally, Siloed Leadership enters like a well-choreographed farce. Marketing promises a world. Digital builds a machine. Operations invent survival techniques. Finance stares at the numbers and quietly sharpens a pencil. Everyone is performing their role beautifully. The guest experiences the entire ensemble at once and decides to eat somewhere else.
What makes Quiet Killers dangerous in the best way is that it refuses to offer a shiny distraction.
There is no new framework with a clever name. There is no promise of innovation through vibes.
The solution is clarity.
Not inspirational clarity. Operational clarity.
Clarity about why the brand exists, what problem it solves, and what it must reliably do for people who are hungry and do not want a relationship with your interface. Clarity that reduces thinking, not enhances it. Clarity that removes features, not adds them. Clarity that allows teams to stop arguing because the answer becomes obvious.
This book will make some readers uncomfortable because it suggests that many of the things they are proud of are simply very expensive ways of avoiding simplicity.
It will make others feel relieved, because it finally names the thing they have been circling for years while pretending it was a KPI issue.
Why you should read this book
Read it if your brand feels heavier than it should. Read it if your app requires instructions. Read it if your teams are aligned on goals but not on reality. Read it if you have ever approved something sensible that quietly made everything worse.
Read it before adding another feature, another vendor, another slide.
Because Quiet Killers makes a deeply inconvenient point.
Most restaurant brands are not underperforming. They are overcomplicating themselves to death.
This book does not save you with drama. It saves you by removing the furniture blocking the exit.
And once you see the killers, they stop being quiet.
