The Executive Chef's Manifesto: How I Run My Network Kitchen

Following my recent piece on the Cook vs. Chef Paradox, many of you asked: "Herve, if the career ladder is broken, how do you actually build a kitchen that scales? How do you turn a junior into a Chef?"

Management isn't about presiding over a dashboard; it's about the heat, the timing, and the people. Here are the four pillars of how I run my "kitchen."

1. Radical Trust: The Secret Sauce

In a high-pressure backbone environment, a mistake isn't just a typo ... it's a "burnt dish" that can cost a company millions. A misconfiguration can lead to continent-scale issues, impacting the daily lives of millions.

To give an engineer the confidence to execute complex tasks on high-stakes infrastructure, you must lead by example.

We've all seen the 'spreadsheet manager' who hovers behind your chair during a P1 crisis, peering at your terminal just to ask why the logs are moving so fast or if the status page font looks off. They add unnecessary panic because they don't understand the blast radius.

Radical trust means getting in the heat with your team. It means speaking their technical language so they feel supported and not just surveilled by a nervous spectator.

• Mistakes are Seasoning: We perform blameless post-mortems. We analyze the "saltiness" (the error) so the whole brigade learns how to balance the dish next time.
• The Safety Net: Trust isn't "blind faith." It's providing the "flight simulators" (Containerlab, On-Prem labs, and certifications) so engineers can find the edge of the envelope before the production "dinner rush" begins.

Case Study: Rebuilding the Plumbing During Service

During our migration from LDP to Segment Routing (SR) we eliminated manual configuration and used small and logical steps to ensure a "soft deployment." It was like completely replacing the kitchen's gas lines and stoves during a Friday night dinner rush: complex and dangerous but invisible to the diners because the leadership understood the underlying plumbing, not just the reservation list.

2. The "Learning Tax": Decoding the "Why"

In the "Agentic Era," simply closing a ticket is the bare minimum. I tell my team: Deliver the project, but pay the learning tax.

We don't just want the What; we want the Why. If you don't understand why we are shaping traffic or why we use a specific BGP community tag, you are just a translator for the AI. Understanding the intent is the only way to ensure the automation isn't "hallucinating" a disaster.

3. Ownership Over Speed: The Long Game

For an implementation of this scale, I tell the team: Take your time. I don't want a "fast cook" who rushes a dish and ruins the flavor; I want a Chef who takes ownership.

Infrastructure is a long-lived mission. A resilient backbone is designed to last a decade not a news cycle. This requires an obsession with first principles. Like Jiro Ono, who at 100 years old still insists on tasting the rice personally every morning, a Chef never stops "tasting" the packets to ensure the foundation is sound.

I've seen the power of this ownership in practice: we once delayed a critical backbone deployment by two weeks because a engineer flagged a subtle routing risk that our automation had missed. In a "Cook's" kitchen, that's a delay. In my kitchen, that is a Chef protecting the quality of the service.

4. The Michelin Pedigree: Legacy & Leverage

Financial compensation is a necessary tool, but the best engineers are driven by Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. In the culinary world, the world's greatest often chefs learned their craft in a Michelin-starred kitchen.

• The "Michelin Star" Reward: The highest reward I can give is Complexity. I reward performance by removing the guardrails and giving them the "high-stakes" tasks.
• The Signature Dish: When a junior proves they can handle the heat, I give them a "Signature Dish" a major project where they own the design from end to end.

Preparing the Next Executive Chefs

I am under no illusion: eventually my best people will move out of my kitchen to run their own brigades. This is the goal. It is the best career leverage we can offer them. My responsibility is to ensure that when they walk out that door, they are leaders who can handle the pressure of a "Grand Service."

The Foundation: Cultural Alignment

Everything I've described is only possible if the working culture is aligned. I was lucky enough to achieve this because my own management was fully aligned with this vision. They understood that a resilient, automated backbone isn't built by "ticket-closers," but by empowered engineers who are given the space to become Chefs.

The Challenge to Leaders

Are you hovering over the stove, or are you teaching your team how to taste the food? If you aren't in the field with them, you aren't leading ... you're just watching.

Fellow leaders and engineers: What was the first "Signature Dish" (major project) you were handed early in your career that proved you were ready to be a Chef?