A View From Twin Peaks

Quick. Define Twin Peaks. Other than the obviously now dated TV show, up until a couple of weeks ago, the only other definition of Twin Peaks was a restaurant chain that featured double entendre advertising, scantily clad women servers and "man food." Now Twin Peaks has a new definition; Twin Peaks means a mass gunfight that left a number of people dead, a lot injured, more than 150 people arrested with a 1,000 weapons seized, and incidentally, a terminated franchisee who had invested more than $1,000,000 to open their restaurant and a franchisor trying to figure out how to do damage control. Those of us in the franchise business immediately recognized a franchised system's nightmare and watched from afar to see how the franchisor and franchisee would handle the disaster. The consensus of many seems to be "not very well." The important question, however, is what lessons are there to be learned from the Twin Peaks debacle.