PEAK

How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow Revised and Updated

Chip Conley

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119434948
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Proven principles for sustainable success, with new leadership insight

PEAK is the popular, transformative guide to doing business better, written by a seasoned entrepreneur/CEO who has disrupted his favorite industry not once, but twice. Author Chip Conley, founder and former CEO of one of the world's largest boutique hotel companies, turned to psychologist Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs at a time when his company was in dire need. And years later, when the young founders of Airbnb asked him to help turn their start-up home sharing company into a world-class hospitality giant, Conley once again used the principles he'd developed in PEAK. In the decade since this book's first edition, Conley's PEAK strategy has been developed on six continents in organizations in virtually every industry. The author's foundational premise is that great leaders become amateur psychologists by understanding the unique needs of three key relationships—with employees, customers, and investors—and this message has resonated with every kind of leader and company including some of the world's best-known, from Apple to Facebook. Avid users of PEAK have found that the principles create greater loyalty and differentiation with their key stakeholders. This new second edition includes in-depth examples of real-world PEAK companies, including the author's own at Airbnb, and exclusive PEAK leadership practices that will take you—and your company's performance—to new heights.

Whether you're at a startup or a Fortune 500 company, at a for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental organization, this book can help you and your people reach potential you never realized you had.

• Understand how Maslow's hierarchy makes for winning business practices
• Learn how PEAK drove some of today's top businesses to success
• Help employees reach their full potential—and beyond

• Transform the customer experience and keep investors happy

The PEAK framework succeeds because it elevates the business from the inside out. These same principles apply in the boardroom, the breakroom, and your living room at home, and have proven to be the foundation of healthy, fulfilled lives. Even if you think you're doing great, you could always be doing better—and PEAK gives you a roadmap to the next level.

Part One
Maslow and Me

Chapter One
Toward a Psychology of Business

If we want to answer the question, how tall can the human species grow, then obviously it is well to pick out the ones who are already tallest and study them. If we want to know how fast a human being can run, then it is no use to average out the speed of the population; it is far better to collect Olympic gold medal winners and see how well they can do. If we want to know the possibilities for spiritual growth, value growth, or moral development in human beings, then I maintain that we can learn by studying the most moral, ethical, or saintly people.

Abraham Maslow¹

Pop.

That word conjures up some nostalgic images for me: my dad who doubled as my Little League coach, a style of music I couldn't get enough of, the Shasta Orange I used to drink by the six-pack.

At the end of 2000, as we were enjoying the second millennium celebration, the word pop had a new meaning to me: it was the sound of champagne flowing, of good times continuing to roll, of prosperity anointing me with a hero's halo.

I had a lot to be thankful for. My company, Joie de Vivre Hospitality, had grown into one of the three most prominent boutique hoteliers in the United States. My first book of any note, The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself in Business, which included a foreword from my demigod, Richard Branson, was hitting the shelves. And USA Today had just profiled me as one of 14 Americans, along with Julia Roberts and Michael Eisner, to be “watched” in 2001. Every indication was that my life, my company, and my budding career as an author were all heading in the right direction—up—and the New Year would be a welcome one. Little did I know that the real thing to watch in 2001 would be that I didn't jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

I went from being a genius to an idiot in one short year. You see, all 20 of my company's unique hotels were in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, you can tell me all about the value of geographic diversification, but in the late 1990s, there was no better place, with the possible exception of Manhattan, to operate a hotel. I had learned long ago that a company can be product-line diverse or geographically diverse, but it's hard to be both. Rather than be a Holiday Inn with replicated product all over the world, we consciously chose the opposite strategy as we built our company. We would focus our growth in California and create what has become recognized as the most eclectic, creative, and handcrafted collection of hotels, lodges, restaurants, bars, and spas in a single geographic location.

But that pop I heard around New Year's was more than just champagne. It was also the sound of the bursting dot-com bubble. It was the pop heard around the world, but nowhere was it louder than in my own backyard. I won't bore you with the details, but even before the tragedy of 9/11 sent the worldwide travel industry into an unprecedented tailspin, San Francisco and Silicon Valley hotels were experiencing annualized double-digit revenue losses because of the high-tech flameout. Bay Area business leaders didn't want to admit that we were as addicted to electronics as Detroit is to cars or Houston to oil, but in 2001, during that first full year of the new millennium, we came to realize that we were going through withdrawal.

It turns out the millennium was sort of the midpoint of the seesaw. The Bay Area had partied for five good economic years in the last half of the 1990s. But just like if you drink heavily for five days approaching New Year's you might also suffer through a five-day hangover, our region experienced a comparable nausea in the first five years of the new millennium. That seesaw hit the ground really hard. My business, my confidence, and my self- worth all took a precipitous fall.

What do you say to a journalist who asks, “How does it feel to be the most vulnerable hotelier in America?” I knew I was feeling rotten, but I didn't realize my melancholy was being observed on a national stage. The reality is my company, after 15 years of rising to the top of the hospitality industry, was suddenly undercapitalized and overexposed in a world that had changed overnight. I never realized that after founding Joie de Vivre at age 26, and dedicating 15 years to building it, there was a risk I could lose everything. Most industry observers thought we were done for.

It wasn't just the dot-com meltdown or 9/11 that led to a truly troubled travel industry. A couple of wars, an outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), and a very weak worldwide economy from 2001 to 2004 didn't help. It seems as if everyone wanted to stay close to home. The San Francisco Bay Area was ground zero for this great depression for American hoteliers. In the history of the United States since World War II, no hotel region in the country had ever experienced the percentage drop in revenues the Bay Area experienced in those first few years of the new millennium. And because Joie de Vivre operated more hotels in the region than any other hotelier, we faced a classic thrive-or-dive dilemma.

I remember sitting on the dock of my best friend Vanda's houseboat in Sausalito, facing the sparkling city of San Francisco across the bay on a crystal-clear morning. It was low tide, which exposed all of the mud and muck of the shoreline. It felt familiar: my business was at low tide. Vanda certainly knew it and, being the poet aficionado she is, she read me a line from a Mary Oliver poem, “Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”^*

I was speechless. I'd been holding my breath ever since I'd heard the pop of the bubble bursting. I had a moment of clarity. This downturn was proving to be a true stress test for my business, but it was also a stress test for me personally. I'd been joking with my Joie de Vivre leadership team that we were becoming a faith-based organization. We truly believed this downturn wouldn't last forever, but with each passing quarter, things only got worse. The pressure made me feel like I was going to pop. I realized I needed to stop holding my breath. Speechless, yes—breathless, no.

A couple of days later, when I was experiencing a bit of malaise, I snuck into the Borders bookstore around the corner from Joie de Vivre's home office. I needed another Mary Oliver fix or some form of inspiration. A CEO in the poetry section of a downtown bookstore on a weekday afternoon? I felt like I should be wearing sunglasses and a disguise. Somehow I drifted over to the psychology section of the bookstore; maybe it had something to do with my mental state.

There among the stacks I came upon a section of books by one of the masters of twentieth-century psychology, Abraham Maslow. I started leafing through Toward a Psychology of Being, a book I'd enjoyed 20 years earlier in my introductory psychology class in college. Moments grew to minutes, which grew to hours as I hunkered down, sheepishly looking over my shoulder every once in a while to make sure no one was watching. I couldn't put the book down. Everything Maslow was saying made so much sense: the Hierarchy of Needs, self-actualization, peak experiences. In the midst of the crisis that was threatening my business, which was challenging me personally as I had not been challenged before, this stuff reminded me why I started my company.

When you name your company after a hard-to-pronounce, harder-to-spell, French phrase meaning “joy of life,” as I did, you must have different motivations than the typical Stanford MBA. The goal I set for myself just a few years out of Stanford was to create a workplace where I could not only seek joy from the day-to-day activities of my career but also help create it for both my employees and customers. I'd done a short stint at Morgan Stanley investment bank and realized that my aspiration in life was not to climb the typical corporate ladder. After deciding against a career in investment banking, I'd spent a couple of years in the rough-and-tumble world of commercial real estate construction and development and realized that spending all day negotiating through adversarial relationships wasn't my idea of a good time, either.

It was on my twenty-sixth birthday that I finished the business plan for Joie de Vivre. At that point, I'd become a tad disillusioned with the traditional business world and was considering a career as a screenwriter or massage therapist (I did training in both). Starting a boutique hotel company was my last option before I took an exit off the business superhighway. What inspired me about the hospitality world was that if we got our job right, we made people happy. And as a boutique hotelier, I could tap into my creativity to do things that I could never do in building an office tower. I remember telling an MBA friend back in 1987, when he was helping me paint my first hotel (I didn't have the budget to hire a professional painting contractor), that Joie de Vivre was my form of self-actualization (we'd both been exposed again to Maslow in a business school class called Interpersonal Dynamics, which all of us deridingly called “touchy-feely”).

Each day during the early part of 2002...