This involved really pushing himself to boil down his vision for the company’s guiding mission into highly persuasive and memorable words, such as creative collaboration and accelerating document productivity. “I obsess over that,” he said, stressing the importance of “learning the power of the written word, because if you get that right, your message will flow off the tongue, you’ll use it with passion.” Then, he emphasized, people will be inspired to rise to the occasion and interpret the guidance as best suits the products or services they’re working on.

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, “the culture was a wreck.” Among many problems, the company’s 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 Hilton’s fortunes that made the LBO one of the most successful in history.

Questioning so many people early on is also a powerful way to convey respect for people’s knowledge, showing them, not just telling them, that you respect them. It also harnesses the enormous power of demonstrating humility. Mark Hoplamazian, who took the helm at Hyatt Hotels Corporation in 2006, credits his great success to fulsomely owning up to his ignorance and asking for help in understanding the business. When he took over at Hyatt, “My experience was within finance: I did not have a lot of managerial experience. On paper, I was seemingly unqualified for the role.

In the year ahead, he surveyed the broader employee base as well as customers and learned that “we didn’t have that same emotional connectivity with our guests.” Or with Hyatt colleagues out on the front lines. Hoplamazian dedicated time to meeting with many of them. Through his own and others’ probing into the colleague experience, he realized that the company evaluated employees largely based on their compliance with an elaborate set of rules and that “we tracked success in our hotels by compliance with a list of brand standards, not guest feedback.

Though Hilton had grown considerably in recent years, largely through acquisitions, including DoubleTree, Embassy Suites, and Hampton Inn, it had taken on a heavy debt burden, and the stock was trading at a lower multiple that its competitors’. But the fundamental problem, Nassetta understood, was the company’s culture. “There was no culture of innovation,” he said. “It was more a culture of do it at a relatively slow pace and do it the way we’ve always done it.” Changing that would be a daunting challenge.