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In the world I live in today, I feel very strongly that culture is more powerful than strategy. As we head towards recovery, far too many organizations are obsessed with strategy. But when I say culture, I mean “the way we get things done around here.”
A couple weeks ago, I traveled to LA to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. And you know, the best hotels in the world, what they do brilliantly is they make the check-in process just disappear. So I'm coming in with my bags, I'm really tired, and I've got a board rehearsal in two hours. All that was on my mind is, “We're rehearsing in two hours.”
Somehow, the doorman takes my bags and probably sees the luggage tag. And before I know it, I get to the desk, and—“Just sign here. Welcome back to [the] Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Mr. Carayol.”
Well, it stunned me, because I've never stayed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. So I said, “I'm very sorry. I've never stayed here.” And she went click, click, click on it. Then she said, “June 1988. You were with a group of 12 from Marks and Spencer”—who I happened to be working for at the time. Now that just knocked me out. And I said, “You know what? That's what I call service.”
And she said, “You look so pleased, I'm going to upgrade you to a suite.” So I'm winning. I get upstairs to my suite, and I'm going to have a shower, get changed, and go and moderate this board rehearsal. But before I do, I tweet. I just tweeted the experience to the very few people that follow me. I said, “That's what I call service,” jumped in the shower, came out. So I picked up my iPhone, there's a tweet back. It's from Ben Trodds, general manager, Beverly Wilshire Hotel: “Thank you ever so much for that fabulous comment. In fact, I'll come and find you and thank you in person.”
I thought, I've never seen that happen before, where you tweet something into the ether, and an organization is so agile, so focused on the customer, so customer-centric. I disappear to our rehearsal. We're an hour in, and I call a five-minute natural break: “Can we change the black coffees? Can we change the water?” The hotel staff come in in their black uniforms with “Beverly Wilshire Hotel” on the front, and they change away.
And someone takes my black coffee and he puts a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne in front of me. I say, “I'm really sorry. Thanks for the offer, but I just wanted a black coffee.” He said, “Ben Trodds, general manager, Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Thank you so much for the tweet this morning.” Now that just does it. Is that culture? Is that training? Is that process? Is that procedure? Is that KPI? It's culture. The epilogue to this is that by the time I get back to London, I've got a ton of tweets coming through commenting about this.
There's one guy who comments—he says, “I've been staying at the same hotel in London for the last six years. Every week, for the last six years, I turn up on a Monday to the same hotel. I get a slightly different experience. They ask me every Monday, ‘Have you stayed here before, sir?’” Culture.
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