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Chapter 1
Ditch the Desk
A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
âJohn le CarrĂŠ
No one would ever confuse me with George Clooney, but I have accomplished something that Ryan Bingham, the character Clooney played in the movie, Up in the Air, coveted. By accumulating more than 10 million frequent-flyer miles, I earned the right to have my name painted on the fuselage of a United Airlines 747.
I was logging around 700,000 miles annually during the 1990s when we were launching Marriottâs international lodging operations, and a good deal of my travel time was spent in the friendly skies of United. One year the airline came up with a unique promotion to reward 50 of its most frequent fliers. And thatâs how the words, âEd Fuller, Customer,â came to be painted beneath the pilotâs window on a United 747.
As president and managing director of the Marriott division that operates and franchises overseas hotels, I spend a significant part of my life flying in and out of the scores of foreign countries where we conduct business. And my 10-million-plus miles have taught me a lot about the value of getting out from behind my desk and building relationships that span cultural differences.
Iâm not unique. For any manager, knowledge of other cultures makes it easier to navigate the complexities of todayâs multicultural workplace. Whether you are managing a clothing factory, a customer call center, or a stock-and-bond trading operation, itâs the rare business that doesnât depend on a diverse group of employees, overseas suppliers, and partners. With all these stakeholders, some understanding of other cultures is an important plank in the building of strong and productive relationships.
A case in point: For nearly 20 years, âMohammedâ had been a friend and business partner. We had shared journeys, meals, and considerable profits while weathering dozens of the disagreements that accompany any successful relationship, business or personal. Then came the day in 2009 when he glared at me and hissed, âYour company will be dead to me when you retire.â
Our association had begun when Mohammed, a successful entrepreneur in the Middle East, decided to build a hotel and needed the management expertise we at Marriott International could provide. Given our long and fruitful history, his outburst was a shock but not a total surprise. Even the closest of business connections can be extraordinarily fragile when the interests of the two parties collide.
For many business leaders, the word relationship evokes excessive emotionalism, and smacks of the dread soft stuff. But not to my ears. During two decades of establishing and directing the international operations of the Marriott hotel chainâa period in which we went from 16 hotels in six countries grossing $325 million to our current 400 properties scattered across 70 countries and with revenues of nearly $7 billionâIâve witnessed the rise and fall of many an enterprise and many a leader. Experience has taught me that, far from being irrelevant, solid relationships are the real bedrock of business success. They can help you solve problems and resolve contentious issues amicably. Relationships are especially important in emerging economies, where a handshake often serves as a valid contract and where written documents are a necessary, if unwelcome, part of doing business with Americans and other Westerners.
Solid relationships are not formed overnight; however, and they are defined by culture and community. Different values and customs can sometimes make genuine connections difficult to build and maintain. In any event, it will take time and effort to cement a bond. And that doesnât happen behind a desk.
A strong connection may begin with untold hours of dining together and mingling at social events. But to reinforce a productive relationship, you need to demonstrate fairness and evenhandednessâwhich is more difficult than you might think in those cultures where win-lose solutions are deemed preferable to win-wins. And even then, the risk of missteps and misperceptions is never far away. Itâs hard work to be sure, but the rewards of getting out from behind your desk and building strong relationships face-to-face are many.
As my crisis with Mohammed demonstrated, however, even after years spent developing trust and confidence, a relationship can be damaged in one disagreeable moment. Our falling-out had its start in a financial dispute between Mohammed and his partners and our neutral stance on the matter.
In subsequent visits, I took pains to assure Mohammed of our respect and admiration and told him we had considered a variety of possible solutions. Nevertheless, he remained frustrated by his predicament, and he eventually told me that the real issue was our refusal to unquestioningly take his side in the quarrel. The depth of our relationship was the only thing that kept the partnership from breaking apart. It allowed us to get beyond the emotions and cultural differences that could have made the rupture permanent. Eventually, the dispute found resolution, but the need to ditch the desk and maintain the relationship remained.
The story of Mohammed resonates across the business landscape. In todayâs borderless world, the ability to create lasting connections is crucial to every business leaderâand maintaining those cross-cultural relationships demands a pragmatic flexibility that isnât taught in business schools.
I wrote this book to share the lessons Iâve learned over 20 yearsâalmost none of them spent behind a deskâdeveloping and tending relationships in dozens of countries. Iâve also drawn on the experiences of other businesspeople and well-known figures whose leadership has produced tremendous results. Many of the personal insights and techniques I describe in these pages are the products of trial and error, with the emphasis on error. They have proven their value over many years, and I hope that youâll find them equally useful.
The World beyond the Desk
Most business leaders need only drive to a plant in a neighboring county or ride the elevator to the ground-floor loading dock to see and appreciate cultural differences. In other words, if you are spending your days meeting with other managers or sitting at your desk doing paperwork, itâs time to broaden your horizons and get closer to your business.
Building successful business relationships is no different than building personal ones. It demands meaningful engagement with another party. When I was assigned to build the Marriott International organization, my most challenging relationships were with some of the companyâs leaders: They had precious little time or resources for our fledgling unit, given that virtually all of Marriottâs operations were based in the United States.
Worse still, our American focus meant that all of our policies and systems were geared to the requirements of our U.S. hotels. That was a problem because what we needed abroad was often quite different from what we had at home. Standards had to be adjusted to meet local customer requirements. For example, we needed prayer rooms in Muslim countries, two equal-size ballrooms to separately accommodate men and women at weddings and other celebrations in the Middle East, more restaurants catering to local tastes and ingredients, varied types of food preparation, and flexible smoking policies, to name a few.
Initially, I did anything I could to get people at headquarters to think globally, including even offering to pay $20 to anyone who used the word global. Iâd happily pull out $20 from my wallet when someone qualified, which wasnât often. Then I went to a meeting at which our CEO Bill Marriott Jr. used global six times in his presentation. When he finished, he turned to me and said: âAll right, Ed, that will be $120.â
We also initiated what I called Iron Bird Tours that took senior executives on 10-day jaunts around the world to visit our hotels and resorts and those of competitors. The trips gave our top people the opportunity to experience different culturesâand customers. Executives could also participate in a four-week education program, one week of which was devoted to global issues. A week-long course in Costa Rica, for example, included a two-hour visit with the countryâs president, Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias. I led the Iron Bird trips for several years (more about that in Chapter 3) and taught in most of our executive education programs. Over time, my colleaguesâand the company as a wholeâbegan to internalize a wider global perspective.
Marriott traces its beginnings to a nine-stool A&W root beer stand that John Willard Marriott and Alice Sheets Marriott opened in Washington, DC, in 1927, just months after their marriage in Utah. Soon, they added Mexican food to the menu and renamed their business the Hot Shoppe, which they expanded into a chain.
Bill and Alice were well acquainted with hard work. As a youngster, Bill had helped his father raise sugar beets and sheep on the familyâs small farm, and Alice had helped her widowed mother keep house. Bill was just 13 when he was given the responsibility of planting, raising, and harvesting crops on a few acres entrusted to him by his father. A year later, on his own, he took 3,000 head of sheep to market in San Francisco.
He held his managers at the Hot Shoppes to his own high standards of performance. He was known for standing beside employees while they worked and quizzing them about company procedures. If a cook failed to come up with the right answer to how many times hash brown potatoes should be turnedâonceâthe cook could expect to be grilled himself on every aspect of his work.
At its peak, the chain offered more than 300 items on its menu. Bill Sr. demanded that every item be fresh and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That forced the managers to occasionally take extraordinary measures. If the boss showed up at one of the restaurants and ordered a dish that wasnât on hand, its manager would immediately call nearby Hot Shoppes to locate the missing comestible. Once it was found, arrangements would be made for runners from each restaurant to meet at some halfway point and pass the food baton.
One of the most fundamental competitive advantages enjoyed by Hot Shoppesâand by later Marriott enterprises as wellâis their consistency. Every detail of every aspect of an operation is painstakingly studied and a âbestâ way of proceeding is developed and set down for all to follow. The resulting guides provide the ground rules that make it possible for employees to deliver consistently high levels of service. One entry lays out 66 steps to thoroughly clean a hotel room in less than 30 minutes. The result: Whether youâre registered at a Marriott in Minneapolis or Monaco, youâre going to get the same serviceâand youâre going to want to register at a Marriott wherever you travel.
In 1937, Bill Sr. literally took a flyer on a new business. He had been making one of his unannounced visits to a Hot Shoppe near Hoover Airfield outside Washington, DC, when he saw that many the customers were buying sandwiches and coffee to take along on their flights. In short order, as it were, he sat down with Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace who was the head of Eastern Air Transport, offering to deliver ready-to-eat boxed lunches to Easternâs passengers. Rickenbacker bit. In-Flite Catering delivered its first meals that same year to flights out of Hoover, a site currently occupied by the Pentagon. In-Flite would eventually become the largest airline catering business in the world.
Bill Sr. was constantly looking for new opportunities. Over time the company began providing food for hospitals and schools. It acquired the concessions to provide meals within airports. It bought restaurant chainsâRoy Rogers and Bobâs Big Boy among themâand resort properties.
In the 1970s, when sales at some of the older Hot Shoppes on toll roads began to fade, the company recognized the latent power of its newer brands. The floundering Shoppes were turned over to Big Boy or Roy Rogers, and business once again boomed. It wasnât long before the managers of Marriottâs concession business adopted that same branding strategy, bringing national chains like Pizza Hut into its airport operations.
In the Marriott familyâs drive for perfection, there actually came a time when, having developed industry-leading processes to manage its various divisions, the company began to sell its expertise to outsiders. Its distribution system, for example, responsible for shipping food and supplies to widespread holdings, gave Marriott a major cost advantage over its competitors. That fact inspired the family to create Marriott Distribution Services, which became a $1 billion business delivering food from 13 distribution centers across the country to such clients as Boston Chicken and Steak and Ale.
The Marriotts first entered the hotel business in January 1958 with the opening of the Twin Bridges in Arlington, Virginia. As usual, the family was a hands-on presence. Bill Jr. described the scene this way: âMother, Dad, and I stayed up half the night hanging pictures so we could check in guests the next day in time for President Eisenhowerâs second inauguration.â
The decision to take on the Twin Bridges was a prescient and gutsy one. The family had no real experience with the industry, and the hotel, with its 365 rooms, was a tough place to start. âWe were flying by the seat of our pants,â is how Bill Jr. put it. One of his first tasks was to find ways to cut expenses. Under an item called âother,â he found a substantial sum charged for ice buckets. The sturdy wax-covered cardboard buckets the hotel was using, which cost a dollar each, were being toted off by guests. He replaced them with permanent ice buckets for each room.
After he became president in 1964, Bill Jr. switched the companyâs focus from food service to lodging. Within six years, the companyâs hotel holdings soared nearly fourfold, lifting its revenues and profits above those of Howard Johnson and Hilton Hotels, the giants of the time.
Generally speaking, the company acquired or built its hotels and then managed them. Then, in the late 1970s, we adopted a model in which we built our hotels and sold the buildings to other companies, often insurance companies or other institutions, with the proviso that we would manage the properties for a fee. The strategy worked well until the recession of the early 1990s caught us with more than $2 billion in hotel assets under construction. We weathered the downturn with great difficulty.
At the same time, we started expanding into international lodging, laying down a basic strategy that has been followed ever since with few exceptions: Third parties build and own the hotels, and we provide the brand, services, and management, collecting a base fee and an incentive fee determined by the hotelâs profits. We also expanded our franchise activities and embraced a multiple brand strategy. Today, Marriott is comprised of more than 18 brands, ranging from Courtyard to Fairfield Inn & Suites to the Ritz-Carlton.
We were forced to override our international no-ownership rule early in the 1990s when we were trying to break into new markets in Asia, Europe, and Latin and South America. We entered into 20 joint ventures because it was impossible to get a hotel built in Hong Kong, Frankfurt, or Chile, to name a few places, without our direct financial investment or some sort of leasing vehicle. To reach our goal of expanding to six continents, we had to build a strategically focused, international business model practically from scratch. We did it by merging leadership, training, clean lines of responsibility, and an emphasis on accountability with our clear set of corporate principles, proving that the âMarriott Wayâ could deliver exceptional value overseas just as it had done back home.
We started by laying out our governing strategies, asking: Which of the Marriott brands should lead the way? Where did we want to establish our first hotels?
The brand question was easily answered given that, in the early 1990s, we had only one full-service brand, Marriott. We knew it would draw international travelers and create a positive impression for our other, smaller brandsâthe so-called halo effect.
I came to understand the power of strong brands when I was based in Chicago running Marriottâs Midwest division in 1986. We operated a good, medium-quality property near the Bloomington, Minnesota, airport. Then we acquired the 602-room Amfac Hotel in nearby Minneapolis. The Amfac was the cityâs premier hotel. It housed three restaurants and was the preferred venue for society events. We were still in the process of rebranding when two of the townâs prominent citizens stopped in to say they were planning to move their annual charity ball to another venue. With nothing but their impression of the airport hotel to guide them, they didnât think Marriott could handle an elegant event. We changed their perception by introducing them to our top-flight operations in other cities.
Our strategy overseas would begin with placing top-quality, highly visible hotels in key capital cities, thus showcasing our premier product and smoothing the way for lower-profile brands to enter secondary markets. Itâs what I call the âbillboardâ effect. Leading with your most prominent brands creates a positive impression. And in the hospitality business, positive impressions go wherever your guests goâfrom big-city markets to smaller ones and back again.
Deciding where to make our international debut was the next question. Our key source markets provided the answer. Source markets are those that typically produce the largest number of international travelers. In the early 1990s, the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France were the top five source markets. The United States led not because most Americans had passportsâfewer than 15 percent did then and only 25 percent do nowâbut because of the size of our population.
We wanted to do business in these countries because of the spectacular potential for growth and because of a little-known fact about the lodging business: When travelers book rooms abroad, they look for hotel brands they recognize or have patronized in their own countries. For example, first-time Japanese travelers to the United States usually book a room at a Hilton. Hilton entered the Japanese market years before any other lodging company, so Japanese travelers know the brand. If we wante...
