• “When removing travel and expense policies, encourage managers to set context about how to spend money up front and to check employee receipts at the back end. If people overspend, set more context.

• With no expense controls, you’ll need your finance department to audit a portion of receipts annually.

• When you find people abusing the system, fire them and speak about the abuse openly—even when they are star performers in other ways. This is necessary so that others understand the ramifications of behaving irresponsibly.

• Some expenses may increase with freedom. But the costs from overspending are not nearly as high as the gains that freedom provides.

• With expense freedom, employees will be able to make quick decisions to spend money in ways that help the business.

• Without the time and administrative costs associated with purchase orders and procurement processes, you will waste fewer resources.

• Many employees will respond to their new freedom by spending less than they would in a system with rules. When you tell people you trust them, they will show you how trustworthy they are.

Rather than hire an additional person, you might choose one of the customer service reps to hold overall accountability, rotating this role among the reps every six months. Again, this doesn’t mean that any of these people is the boss; it means they are to monitor the situation, ensure that customer-satisfaction feedback is gathered and reported to the leadership team at the weekly meeting, and alert the team if there are issues.

Meanwhile, all 35,000 Ritz-Carlton employees participate in some kind of Daily Line-Up at their local hotels. (A great deal has been written about their Line-Ups. It is worth searching for information online.)

I’d managed 95 percent of my budget aggressively, leveraging MoMA’s brand to get excellent gelato at a steep discount, and the beautiful cart for free. I’d earned the right to splurge on those spoons, the one small detail I believed would dramatically transform the experience of getting an ice cream at the cart. This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.” It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend.

Thankfully, there were people close enough to me to tell me the truth. I had a number of conversations with senior staff, who told me there was ambiguity where there shouldn’t have been any: “Nobody’s making decisions, and when someone does step up, they’re accused of making a power grab. You have to name a GM, Will.”

But all I heard was: You need to work harder. You’re not here and you need to be, so you better figure out a way to shoehorn an extra hour into the day so you can do your new job and this one, too. No matter how guilty I felt, I was able to rationalize it away. “How bad could it be, when our guests were so happy?