Part 2. Systems and procedures

When my wife, Donna, and I were first married forty-some years ago, my father would visit our house and – like clockwork – run his index finger over the furniture, doorsills, and Venetian blinds checking for dust.

Needless to say, this drove my wife nuts.

I had it even worse. Donna merely married into Dad's perfectionism; I was born into it. When I was a child, one of my regular chores was to shine my father's shoes on Saturday so they would be pristine for church on Sunday. I can still recall one long afternoon spent sitting in the bathroom with my mother, scrubbing furiously at some kind of awful, black gummy stuff that Dad had picked up on his soles during his travels that week. It took us hours to clean that junk off, but we did it. And I learned a lasting lesson in sticking with a job until it's done right.

As you might imagine, my father was a challenge to live with. And just as exacting to work for. He was never satisfied with anything. Perfection was one notch below desired result.

When he visited the company's restaurants and hotels, it was the same story. There was a specified way of doing things, and heaven help employees who caught my father's eye when they weren't following Marriott's standard operating procedures (SOPs). More than one Hot Shoppes cook, I'm sure, was stunned to find the chairman of the board standing by his side, testing him on how many times hash brown potatoes should be turned on the grill. If the reply was anything but "once," you can bet my dad quizzed that employee to exhaustion about every other aspect of the job, suspicious about what other procedures the poor fellow may have been ignoring.

I'm more readily satisfied than my father ever was. But like him, I do believe that there's a right way and a wrong way of doing things – and doing things the right way is worth making a habit. This includes taking care of the smallest details.

We are sometimes teased about our passion for the Marriott Way of doing things. If you happen to work in the hospitality industry, you might already be familiar with our encyclopedic procedural manuals, which include what is probably the most infamous of the bunch: a guide setting out sixty-six separate steps for cleaning a hotel room in less than half an hour.

Maybe we are a little fanatical about the way things should be done. But for us, the idea of having systems and procedures for everything is very natural and logical: If you want to produce a consistent result, you need to figure out how to do it, write it down, practice it, and keep improving it until there's nothing left to improve. (Of course, we at Marriott believe that there's always something to improve.)

Why do we feel that doing things consistently is so important? The simple answer is that it's the solid foundation upon which virtually every aspect of Marriott rests. If we've got our systems down cold, everything else becomes that much easier. Think about it for a moment. At the most basic level, systems help bring order to the natural messiness of human enterprise. Give 100 people the same task – without providing ground rules – and you'll end up with at least a dozen, if not 100, different ways of doing it. Try that same experiment with a few thousand people, and you end up with chaos. Efficient systems and clear rules help everyone to deliver a consistent product and service.

One of our chief aims is to provide our customers with service free of hassles and surprises. Road-tested systems and SOPs make this possible by taking the element of surprise out of situations where surprise is the last thing a guest wants. We try to provide a level of service so dependable that a guest can land on our doorstep virtually asleep on her feet and not miss a "zzz" while we register and usher her to a room for the night.

That level of consistency gives customers confidence in your brand name and an incentive to come back again and again. We could not have expanded as quickly, widely, or profitably as we have over the years if we had had to reinvent the wheel every time we unveiled a new hotel, resort, restaurant, or senior living community. Or if we were forced to reintroduce ourselves to the world each time a new facility opened. Many guests at our newest properties come because they've already experienced Marriott elsewhere. Customers probably don't spend a moment thinking about it, but it's partly our systems and SOPs that bring them back.

Systems have been deeply ingrained for so long in our corporate culture that I'm always a little surprised when I come across companies that aren't as devoted to them as we are. Among our peers in the hospitality industry, I often see wasted opportunities to improve performance, simply because no one seems to be focusing on developing, much less implementing and maintaining, systems and standards. The result is uneven, unreliable, and often unremarkable service. Perhaps you've already discovered this in your travels when you've stayed at two hotels that share the same name, yet you experienced vastly different levels of quality in rooms and service.

Marriott has developed chain-wide systems and safety nets to try to prevent that from happening. When you walk into a full-service Marriott hotel in downtown Washington, you'll be treated to the same basic experience you would get if you were checking in to the Los Angeles Airport Marriott three time zones away. A Residence Inn in Minneapolis will offer the same amenities that you've come to expect from the one located just down the street from your best client in Santa Clara, California. Each Marriott brand has its own heart-of-the-house systems and SOPs that define and promote consistency across the brand.

Those systems and safety nets didn't appear overnight, of course. Undergirding and shaping them is seventy-plus years of detail-obsessed Marriott corporate culture. Like our hands-on management philosophy, Marriott's pursuit of consistency goes back to our Hot Shoppes roots in the late 1920s. Almost from the start, my parents – especially my father – launched the process of figuring out how to do something right and then writing it down. From washing windows to burnishing silverware to arranging buffet tables and processing customers' checks, no aspect of the workplace went untouched by my dad's penchant for systemization.

One of Marriott's earliest and longest-lived SOPs is our recipe card system, originally developed for us by a professional dietitian in the 1940s. In her specially built test kitchen, Mrs. Savage would experiment with new Hot Shoppes dishes and come up with the best recipes for large-quantity preparation. Recipe cards became' SOP in our hotel restaurants, too. Anyone who deviated from Mrs. Savage's instructions – or worse, didn't have the card out in clear view when preparing a dish – was sure to provoke a sharp-tongued lecture from my father.

You might think that by the time I came on board with the company in the mid-1950s, there was no room for improvement in our systems. By then we'd been in business thirty years. Dad, of course, would never have agreed. My first full-time job with Marriott was in food service; my main task was to continue to beef up our food service standards.

My budding career in food service ended abruptly when I asked Dad to let me get involved with managing our brand-new hotel "division." (Division? We had one hotel up and running in 1957!) In contrast to Hot Shoppes, systems were few and far between on the hotel side of the business.

Maybe I should have been more daunted by our lack of experience in lodging, but truth be told, it was terrific fun. We were flying by the seat of our pants, thrilled and a little surprised by our own moxie. We didn't exactly start out modestly. Our first hotel, Twin Bridges, was a sprawling complex of 365 rooms. Our second, Key Bridge, had more than 200 rooms to start. Virtually before the original paint dried, we added more rooms and public spaces to both hotels and began planning our third and fourth.

We were able to transfer a few systems from the Hot Shoppes to the hotels, but it was really the transfer of attitude about systems that counted most. The whole time we were fussing, fiddling, experimenting, and generally mucking around with our first few properties, we were also diligently jotting down every idea that seemed to work, slowly building from the ground up not only our hotels but also the systems to run them.

I remember starting room service from scratch at Twin Bridges, about four months after the hotel opened. Talk about a hands-on, making-it-up-as-you-go-along experience. I had just officially moved over from the food service side of the company. At the end of my first month on the new job, I found myself putting together room service trays and filling guest orders myself. Not that I was any kind of expert on the subject! I quickly trained two or three other people, and they took it from there.

Keeping costs under control was another challenge. My very first "executive decision" involved, of all things, ice buckets. I was looking over our expenses for Twin Bridges a few weeks into the operation and noticed a pretty hefty sum under the category "Other." A little investigation revealed that guests found our plastic-covered, cardboard ice buckets so sturdy and convenient that they were filling them up with ice and drinks to take on the road. At a dollar apiece, the loss of thousands of buckets in a year would have quickly eaten up our meager profits. (Average room rate in 1957 was $9 a night!) I then ordered permanent ice buckets to be placed in each room, and we were back in business.

Earlier, I credited Marriott's systems and SOPs with being the "solid foundation" of the entire corporation. You may be wondering if knowing how to cook hash browns, run room service, and substitute permanent ice buckets really qualifies for so lofty a status. Perhaps you've been waiting for the inside scoop on inventory, payroll, and accounting?

We have plenty of administrative systems, of course. And cutting-edge finance has definitely played a part in our story. But the best administrative and financial systems in the world wouldn't have gotten us very far if we hadn't had something to sell. In Marriott's case, our principal product is probably not what you think it is. Yes, we're in the food-and-lodging business (among other things). Yes, we "sell" room nights, food and beverage, and time-shares. But what we're really selling is our expertise in managing the processes that make those sales possible. And that expertise rests firmly on our mastery of thousands of tiny operational details.

Let me explain. If you're not in the hospitality industry, you might not be aware that the mainstream chain hotels you stay in are rarely owned by the company whose name is on the building. As of 1997, Marriott owns outright only about a half dozen of the more than 1,500 hotels that bear the Marriott logo.

Many of the most recent additions to our lodging system have come from franchising the Marriott brands. But from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, our primary growth in lodging came from building and selling hotels to investors and taking back long-term (often seventy-five-year) management contracts. Between 1978 and 1990, we boosted the number of our guest rooms from about 20,000 to more than 150,000, each year increasing the proportion of rooms under management by Marriott but not owned by the company itself.

I won't explain here why that particular financing method made sense for us; my aim is simply to highlight the fact that Marriott's major selling point—the fuel for our growth since 1978 – has been our ability to show investors that we know what we're doing when it comes to running a hotel. That's where the hash browns, room service, and ice buckets (plus thousands of other details) come into play. All of our intense attention to detail translates into consistent quality. Consistent quality leads to high customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction translates into high occupancy, repeat business, and good room rates. Those in turn bring home good profits and attractive returns to the property owners.

In short, if we couldn't produce high customer satisfaction, none of the rest would follow. Marriott probably wouldn't have 100 hotels, much less 1,500, under its various flags. Only by being able to show our investors that we have what it takes to run a profitable hotel with a strong customer base can we win their confidence ... and long-term management contracts. So when I say that the company's prosperity rests on such things as our sixty-six-steps-to-clean-a-room manual, I'm not exaggerating.

Our operational skills were also what saved us when the hotel industry ran into trouble at the beginning of the 1990s. Marriott, like many lodging companies, got caught in the real estate crash that kicked off the decade. One of the principal things that helped us make it through the tough times was our long-haul track record in managing profitable hotels and contract services. In order to ride out the economic downturn, we had to maintain customer and investor confidence in our fundamental strength. Our terrific folks in operations, plus our tried-and-true; systems, helped pull our fat out of the fire by maintaining consistent results in customer satisfaction.

Now that I've praised systems and SOPs to the skies, let me talk a little bit about what they don't do. Even the most maniacally detailed procedures can't cover every situation, problem, or emergency that might arise. The quirkiness of life simply doesn't allow for it. And I'm not sure that it would be such a good idea if it did. Things would be pretty boring.

What solid systems and SOPs do is nip common problems in the bud so that staff can focus instead on solving the uncommon problems that come their way. In a service industry, that – plus a bias for action – is the key to success. By nailing the basics into place, systems allow employees to provide more customized customer service. They can just get on with the job of delivering the kind of quality attention that distinguishes extraordinary from ordinary.

As important as it is to Marriott to strive for a level of consistency that allows customers to depend on us, we also don't want to let consistency turn into rigidity. A guest who gets sick in the middle of the night, for example, doesn't want to wait around while a desk clerk looks up the right SOP for the situation. She just wants to get to the hospital. The same goes for a guest whose car was towed from a downtown parking lot, or who left his passport in room 303 and is now calling from an airport courtesy phone, panicked about making his international flight. There is no SOP for the guest who sheepishly appears at the front desk twice a day because he keeps misplacing his electronic keycard. Just a little humor, compassion, and a new card.

During my lifetime with the company, I've heard hundreds of stories about extra mile customer service that Marriott associates have provided to our guests. And those are just the ones I've been told; I know that there are thousands more. I'm never surprised - but always delighted - by what I hear. To me, it's yet another sign that our corporate culture is thriving.

Let me share a couple of stories to show you what I mean.

The first involves a woman who came to stay at one of our smaller properties to attend a week-long national conference nearby. She was scheduled to give the first big speech of her career on the second day of the meeting. Things got off to a rocky start soon after check-in when she realized that she'd left both the battery and the power cord of her laptop computer at home. She desperately wanted to make last-minute revisions to her speech. One of our part-time associates, who's a bit of a computer jock on the side, managed to find exactly the cord she needed.

No sooner was the guest back in business than the laptop's hard drive crashed, a victim of age. Her speech was now less than twenty-four hours away, and everything seemed to be going wrong. Not to fear. Someone in the hotel's accounting department found an empty terminal and desk for her and coached her through the revision process. By the time they finished and printed out the new version of the speech, they were fast friends. The accountant pulled a couple of colleagues who were just finishing up their shifts into a small meeting room to act as an audience for a quick rehearsal. Then the same group used their lunch break the next day to play the role of smiling supporters as the guest finally (and flawlessly) delivered her talk before a packed room. I defy anyone to write an SOP to cover that!

The second story is one of my favorites, and one that never fails to move me and make me very proud of Marriott. It's not often that a company gets to play fairy godmother.

A few years ago, one of our guest representatives received a call from a bride-to-be who wanted to schedule her honeymoon at one of Marriott's Caribbean resorts. When he checked back with her to discuss specific dates and room availability, she sadly told him that her fiancé had just been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and had only a few months to live. They planned to marry anyway, but were going to have to move the wedding up to accommodate his chemotherapy. Unfortunately, the only seven-day stretch of time available for their honeymoon fell during a black-out period for the resort. There didn't seem to be any solution, so the woman thanked the guest representative for his help and hung up.

Touched by the woman's dilemma, the associate called the GM at the resort and explained the situation. The GM not only approved the reservation but upgraded their accommodations. The bride was thrilled. Then, just when it looked like things were on track, the woman called back in tears to thank Marriott for its efforts, but to say that the airline couldn't get the couple to the resort during the scheduled week.

Not satisfied with the turn of events, the guest representative called another airline and told the couple's story. Even though the airline wasn't one of our Marriott Miles travel program partners, it happily agreed to fly the honeymooners to the resort—first class and on a complimentary basis. Not to be out-done, we likewise comped the couple their room. About four months later, our guest representative, who had made all the arrangements, received a thank-you letter from the woman. The couple had married and enjoyed a wonderful honeymoon. Not long after, her husband had died. Just before his death, he told his wife about how precious their time together on the island had been to him. She closed her letter by saying: "You'll never know what you and Marriott did for us."

That second story alone is proof enough for me that there are times when no rule, no system, no SOP can possibly fill the bill. The only display of "consistency" appropriate to the situation was our associate's determination to help the couple enjoy their honeymoon. Besides, there are times when a preoccupation with consistency can be a double-edged sword. I refer to Marriott's relatively late embrace of hotel franchising. Much of Marriott's most recent growth in lodging has come from franchising. We weren't always so enthusiastic about the idea. My father, perfectionist to the core, was not a fan of the concept. He saw what had happened to the Howard Johnson chain in the 1930s and 1940s when they franchised their restaurants widely and lost control of the situation. Among other things, the company failed to enforce strict, uniform standards of maintenance, food, and service. As a result, Hojo's restaurants went downhill and the brand name lost its luster. My father wasn't about to risk having the same thing happen to him!

Dad's reluctance kept Marriott out of serious hotel franchising until the 1990s, with good and bad results. The downside of waiting so long to take a wholehearted plunge into franchising is that we missed out on valuable expansion opportunities for a couple of decades.

The upside is that the delay gave us ample time to develop a solid track record as operators so that affiliation with the company's brand is more valuable to our franchisees now than it might otherwise have been. We have also been able to develop systems to help our franchisees understand what we expect of them. And we've had the opportunity to develop truly franchise-friendly products like Fairfield Inn, Fairfield Suites, Courtyard, and Town Place Suites—all of which are relatively easy to run compared to a full-service hotel.

As Marriott continues to grow in the United States and abroad—whether by franchising, acquisitions, conversions, or ground-up construction—the company's strong systems and SOPs will remain a basic building block of expansion.

Linguistic survey of part 2:

1. Use appropriate prepositions. Consult the text if you doubt your memory:

to be suspicious…sth	to prevent sb…sth
to be familiar…sth	to treat sb…sth
to have confidence…sth	to be an expert…sth
to be devoted…sth	to rest…sth
to focus…sth	to strive…sth
to depend…sth	to be based…sth