When I think about making an enterprise flexible at scale, I often think of Chipotle. (No, not because it makes me hungry.) Chipotle's menu is a nearly perfect example of how a company can achieve both flexibility and scalability through the way it structures its offering.
Take a guess at how many distinct entrees you can order at a Chipotle. Go ahead — I'll wait.
When I've asked in workshops, most people guess around 100. A few say 4,000 to 5,000. One person guessed 100,000. Almost no one anticipates the real answer: Chipotle can make 12,582,912 distinct entrees. That is remarkable flexibility for a fast-casual chain — a bespoke meal for every customer, built from a standard menu. And the cost of delivering one distinct combination barely differs from any other.
This is how we ought to think about organizational capabilities, not just products. It runs counter to intuition — we're used to believing that bespoke means expensive. Chipotle shows that something flexible enough to be bespoke doesn't have to be.
Chipotle can make 12,582,912 distinct entrees.
The key is knowing where you need rigidity and where you need flexibility. Chipotle forces customers through a standard process. You can't start with the protein; you first have to say which entree type — burrito, bowl, taco — you want. You don't skip ahead to toppings. Rice comes next, then beans. The goal is for you to get the entree you want, but by standardizing the process, Chipotle dictates a workflow that's more efficient for it to deliver than one where every customer sets the order.
This matters because many businesses avoid standardization. Lines of business sit in silos and believe what they do is unique. That absence of standardization drives up cost and slows everything down — often to the detriment of the enterprise and of the very business unit trying to change how it works.
| Entree type | Rice | Beans | Protein | Toppings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burrito | White | Black | Brisket | Guacamole |
| Burrito bowl | Brown | Pinto | Chicken | Mild salsa |
| Quesadilla | Steak | Corn salsa | ||
| Salad | Barbacoa | Medium salsa | ||
| Crispy taco | Carnitas | Hot salsa | ||
| Soft taco | Sofritas | Sour cream | ||
| Veggies | Fajita veggies | |||
| Cheese | ||||
| Lettuce | ||||
| Queso |
When I worked in media, I had production units insist that their daily news program was fundamentally different from their documentary series, all to justify avoiding standardization. From where I sat, they did basically the same thing — produce a media product — just at a different pace. Standardizing the process is exactly what let us automate it and increase the speed, which mattered to both the daily news team and the documentary team.
That requires stepping back from the day-to-day to ask honestly: which processes or capabilities are actually common? Where they differ, do they need to? Could one process serve everyone in a basic way?
Answer that, and you can see where a process or system genuinely needs to flex — where to add options so a particular business gets what makes it distinct. Better still, you start to spot capabilities worth extending to other units that could take advantage of them.
That's where Chipotle's options come in: six entree types, two rices, two beans, seven proteins, ten toppings. Everyone gets all of them. In a siloed enterprise, only some business units would have a given capability while others went without.
Building enterprise services this way affords enormous flexibility without delivering every option at once. You can imagine an earlier version of Chipotle offering only a handful of choices per stage. The structure also lets it add or drop choices — informed by data — without overhauling the operation.
That's how you achieve flexibility at scale: standardize the core of what's being done, then decide where to add the options individual businesses need. Now I feel hungry.