Part 1. Managers and executives

"The true test of civilization," declared American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1870, "is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops – no, but the kind of man the country turns out."

I'd like to offer a contemporary twist on Emerson's noble thought. That is, the true test of a company is the kind of manager it turns out. Naturally, I'd like to think that Marriott passes this test hands down.

I recently spent the better part of a day with a Marriott associate who fits my notion of the kind of manager our company should aspire to produce. He's the general manager of one of our largest convention hotel properties. As GM, he's essentially the captain of the ship. As we toured the property together, this fellow radiated energy and enthusiasm. He knew every inch of the hotel and grounds, and he never missed a beat answering my detailed questions.

Happy as I was with the hotel's "numbers" – guest satisfaction scores, occupancy rates, profitability, etc. – I was even more delighted by the interaction between the hotel's staff and the GM as we strolled the heart of the house and public areas. Not only did he know every staff member of this mini-city by sight – without checking name tags – but better yet, he was greeted by smiles, teasing, and hellos from just about every Marriott associate we passed.

What's the big deal? Why was I so pleased?

At Marriott, the reaction of staff to the GM is the ultimate litmus test of how well a hotel is run. The same goes for any of our managers in any division of the company. If employees are tickled to see the boss, I know that he or she is a great hands-on manager. Only someone who spends much of the day strolling the hallways or property talking to employees and taking their concerns to heart earns such a friendly greeting.

Why is it so important that our managers be out on the floor all day and not holed up in an office? If a manager is hands-on, more than likely he's also on top of his business. He can pick up immediately on problems, concerns, or issues and take care of them before they fester or grow. Conversely, a manager who doesn't know his staff by name, who doesn't spend the bulk of the day walking the heart of the house, will eventually have problems. He's just not going to have the same rapport with associates or the knowledge base to make decisions as do his hands-on counterparts.

That's why when I come across a GM who excites his or her employees like the fellow at the big convention hotel, I'm excited, too. We've got a long-term winner-for the property, associates, guests, and company. I'm especially gratified if I discover that the GM grew up, so to speak, in the Marriott system. Someone who has learned to be a good hands-on manager while at Marriott is the best test of our company's management philosophy. It tells me that after seventy years, our original corporate culture is still going strong.

The hands-on, management-by-walking-around approach became a Marriott tradition the moment the doors of our first root beer stand opened on May 20, 1927. My father, J. Willard Marriott, was the ultimate hands-on manager. He visited his restaurants almost every day, often with my younger brother Dick and me in tow. Of course, as a kid, I just thought we were going out to eat. As I got older, I caught on to what Dad was up to. To him, the best way – the only way – to know what was really going on in his business was to see it and hear it with his own eyes and ears.

My father's hands-on attitude wasn't limited to inspecting, correcting, or approving. When we opened our very first hotel (Twin Bridges, Arlington, Virginia) in January 1957, Mother, Dad, and I stayed up half the night hanging pictures so we could check in guests the next day in time for President Eisenhower's second inauguration.

Some of my own earliest experiences working for the company were also literally hands-on. When I took on the assignment of shepherding our second hotel (Key Bridge, Arlington, Virginia) into existence in 1958, I was responsible for everything from hiring the architect and designing the hotel to securing the general contractor for construction to putting together the team we needed to get the hotel up and running on opening day. If I thought that in pulling off such a tall order I'd outgrown my days of picture-hanging, I soon learned otherwise. The week before our first Philadelphia hotel opened on City Line Avenue in 1961, I was down on my knees gluing rubber baseboard into place in the lobby.

Those early experiences reinforced my conviction that there's simply no substitute for being hands-on if you truly want to understand your business.

Not everyone is comfortable in the spotlight, I know, but every manager and business leader ought to at least give the hands-on approach a try. Pretend you don't have a desk or an office for a week or just a couple of days. You might discover that you've been missing out on a wealth of opportunities to connect with employees and customers, assess your businesses first-hand, and spot new ways of improving customer and associate satisfaction.

The time I spend on the road – actually, some 150,000 air miles a year – visiting Marriott locations is invaluable to me. One of the most important things it allows me to do is counter the notion that big corporations are faceless machines. If you're in the service business and your name is above the door, it's important for people to be able to link a face to the name. I want our associates to know that there really is a guy named Marriott who cares about them, even if he can only drop by every so often to personally tell them so.

I also want to show our team in the field that I value their work enough to take the time to check it out. Without their help, Marriott not only wouldn't be Marriott, Marriott wouldn't be. So I do get down on the floor in hotel rooms and check under the beds. I open dresser drawers; switch on faucets, showers, and lamps; and peek in closets to see if there's an iron and ironing board and enough hangers.

Visits are not limited to the public areas. I head for the heart of the house, too. I check out the laundry, accounting, kitchen, and any other corners that I think merit a quick look. There's method to my madness. If I see smiling faces and well-scrubbed surfaces behind the scenes, I know that the rest of the hotel more than likely is doing just fine.

Unlike my father, who had a habit of dropping in at the Hot Shoppes, I rarely show up at Marriott locations unannounced. I often visit as many as ten locations in a single day, so I want to make every minute count. But letting people know that I'm coming for a visit occasionally has its humorous downsides. Over the years, I've become an old hand at recognizing last-minute the-boss-is-coming freshening up. Especially new coats of paint. I carry paint remover in my overnight kit to make short work of the inevitable spots on my suits that result from good intentions.

In addition to keeping me connected to Marriott's associates, my visits teach me volumes about what's working out in the field. I can't think of a single tour in all the years I've been on the road that didn't teach me something. I'm constantly impressed by the ingenuity of our associates. I invariably return home with stacks of index cards filled with ideas about things that we should be doing or things that are out of whack and need fixing. Those ideas quickly find their way into the hands of members of the team at headquarters who can either solve the problem or spread the word about a good concept that works.

I would say, in fact, that one of the most rewarding things about being so close to every aspect of Marriott's business is watching great ideas cross-fertilize. Marriott's first experiment in promoting brand names (a.k.a. "branding"), for example, came at our toll-road restaurants back in the 1970s. Eager to breathe new life into a few older, lackluster turnpike facilities, we switched them over to our Roy Rogers and Big Boy restaurant brands. Sales took off! Travelers enjoyed the comfort of knowing that they could pull off the road on a long trip and sit down to a familiar menu.

In due time, the folks in Marriott's airport concession business took note of the success of their counterparts in toll roads and adapted the idea to fit their customers' needs. We hooked up first with Pizza Hut, followed by other recognized fast-food brands, and soon our airport concession business was also enjoying a boom in sales, thanks to the power of branding. My only real role in Marriott's original branding experiment was giving the official nod, but it's been great seeing the concept succeed, catch fire, and spread. Today, our entire lodging division, for example, is organized under a "brand management" structure. Best of all, I like knowing that it was the hands-on, always-alert-to-opportunity attitude of managers in both toll-road and airport concessions that allowed that original idea to take hold and flourish.

Visiting Marriott locations year in and year out has also provided me with a strong knowledge base for making decisions. Because I'm constantly involved in the day-to-day aspects of the business, our staff knows that if they come to me with a concern or idea, they're usually not going to have to spend a lot of time getting me up to speed. They can normally get my yea or nay readily and take action quickly.

For example, a few years ago, Marriott's time-share division (Marriott Vacation Club International, or MVCI) presented their budget for converting the old Custom House in downtown Boston. I liked the concept, but the economics of the project were thin. The property's views of Boston Harbor from rooms on the upper floors brought to mind the breathtaking "rooms with a view" that I had visited not long before at an oceanfront Marriott in Kauai, Hawaii. The Pacific-view rooms naturally commanded a higher rate. The parallel was obvious. Why not charge a little more for the upper-floor rooms with a splendid harbor view in the Custom House? We quickly adopted a differential pricing structure for our harbor-view rooms, and the financial picture brightened accordingly. An example on a much larger scale is a decision we made to sell off the fine-dining operations of two food service companies Marriott acquired in the 1980s. Marriott had been in the restaurant business for nearly six decades at that point and had had its own fine-dining operations in the past. I knew enough about the business from personal, frontline experience to know that we didn't want to wrestle with that category again. So when we purchased the giant food service purveyor Saga Corporation for $700 million in 1986, we immediately sold off its restaurants for $350 million. If we had not already had our own hands-on experience with fine dining, we might have lost time and a lot of money trying to make those restaurants work instead of quickly passing them on to someone eager to take them off our hands.

Sometimes it takes us a little longer to see the light. But once we do, we try to move fast. About a decade ago, we took a fresh look at our sixty-year-old internal distribution system and realized that we were sitting on top of a potential new external business. Since the days of the Hot Shoppes, we had been handling our own shipping of food and supplies among Marriott properties. With so many locations and a yearly grocery tab destined to grow into hundreds of millions of dollars, it had made economic sense to cultivate an in-house distribution capability. What didn't occur to us for a long time was the potential for selling this distribution experience to others. The lightbulb went on when we discovered that our costs were lower than our competitors. This realization, combined with our in-depth knowledge of the distribution business, gave us the confidence to move quickly to sign up outside clients for Marriott Distribution Services (MDS). External customers now supply more than half the annual sales for MDS.

Another big benefit of being hands-on is what the marketplace can teach you free of charge. Nothing replaces listening to your own customers firsthand. Not only will you find out what you're doing right and wrong, you might just pick up an idea for a brand-new product or business.

Marriott's former In-Flite airline catering division was the result of one such exercise by my father. In 1937, while visiting the Hot Shoppe adjacent to the old Hoover airfield on the outskirts of Washington, he noticed customers buying sandwiches and hot coffee to take with them. A little Q and A got to the heart of the matter. Travelers wanted to eat on the plane.

Dad soon flew to Miami to propose an onboard meal program to Eastern Air Transport's chief, Eddie Rickenbacker, and what would at one point be the world's largest airline catering business was born. All because my father was on the scene and had his eyes open to new opportunities.

The incubation of Courtyard by Marriott in the early 1980s is another good example of how keeping your eyes and ears open in the marketplace can make for good business. Until Courtyard's debut, Marriott had focused only on the full-service hotel business. Other segments were new territory for us. When we decided to go after the moderate-priced hotel segment, we pulled out all the stops. We wanted to know exactly what we were up against. Our small, fanatically dedicated Courtyard team scattered to the four winds, checking out the competition by literally checking in to their hotels for a firsthand look. Team members spent hundreds of nights sitting in competitors' hotel rooms taking detailed notes about furnishings, room arrangements, and service. They also interviewed business travelers to learn what they wanted in a hotel room. The information gathered was critical to the fresh concept and design of Courtyard by Marriott.

Like the Courtyard team, my own hands-on practice also includes intense information gathering . . . inside Marriott's four walls. I don't hesitate to call down into our organization several levels to hear different viewpoints or make a quick query. I suspect this particular tic occasionally turns the place upside down, sending people running in all directions to get me answers, but it's a good idea to fight the hierarchy and bureaucracy that creep into any organization that has as many employees as we do. I also firmly believe that both the company and I benefit from knowing that I'm only a casual phone call away from any point in the organization.

Working for someone who is a true believer in the hands-on philosophy isn't always easy. I know—I worked for my father for almost thirty years. In spite of what I've just said about my own hands-on style, I'dlike to think that our staff today has it a little bit easier than my dad's Hot Shoppes managers forty years ago.

Back in the heyday of the Hot Shoppes, the daily menu had more than 300 items on it. My father insisted that every selection be available – and fresh – at all times. Naturally, this is virtually impossible in the restaurant business, but Dad would not hear otherwise. If he went into a Hot Shoppe and they were out of something, he'd raise the roof. After a few such instances, the managers took matters into their own hands. When my dad showed up at a shop and ordered something that wasn't available, the kitchen would call the nearest Hot Shoppe to see if they had it.

If they did, runners from the two restaurants would meet in the middle to rush the order back to my unsuspecting father.

Pretty ingenious, eh? I'm still trying to decide if that's an example of "hands-on" or "hand-off" management. Whatever you call it, there are moments during my whirlwind property tours when I feel a close kinship with those Hot Shoppes runners. Being on my feet all day and truly running from location to location to stay on schedule can leave me wiped out at the close of business. But even as I'm easing gratefully into a hot shower at day's end, I know I wouldn't trade my time on the run for the most comfortable desk chair in the world.

Linguistic Survey of Part 1:

1. Memorize the two abbreviations used by the narrator:

“a.k.a.” and “Q and A”. You are quite right! They are “also known as” and “question and answer” respectively.