Chris Nassetta, when appointed to the helm of Hilton Hotels in 2007, made vital discoveries by travelling to a large number of hotels to talk with employees. The company had just been purchased in a high-stakes leveraged buyout by Blackstone for $26 billion, one of the largest LBO deals ever. For his first three months, Nassetta travelled to Hiltons in the United States and abroad, talking to workers on the front lines, such as bellhops and cooks, in addition to hotel managers, and questioning customers. He discovered that, as he put it, āthe culture was a wreck.ā Among many problems, the companyās standards for service were subpar. To kick-start rapid improvement, he instituted a requirement that every company manager spend three days working in a hotel, at the front desk or in the kitchen and doing housekeeping. He also implemented an employee evaluation process, emphasizing quality of customer service provided. Those were early steps in a many-years-long process of creating a culture of excellence, which, as we detail in Chapter 7, drove a remarkable turnaround in Hiltonās fortunes that made the LBO one of the most successful in history.