Are there times when your life just feels out of control? I’ve been feeling that way lately – given all the travel, the fast growing company, and all the preparation for the launch of another book. Fortunately, this weekend I went back to a practice that my good friend Jon Staub and I have been enjoying for years and years (but one I’ve neglected too often lately). Each season, Jon and I would come up to his mountaintop ranch in Sonoma and do a three and a half day organic grape juice fast interspersed with meandering hikes, long steam baths, and the occasional nap. It’s amazing how a fast can slow you down and put you back in touch with what’s essential in who you are.
While up here, I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Darrin McMahon called HAPPINESS: A HISTORY . McMahon charts the history of that ephemeral concept called happiness and how it has morphed through time. My favorite philosopher that he’s been quoting is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who wrote in the mid-1700’s. On a fast, how can I not be drawn to writing that suggests our happiness can be “nothing external to us, nothing apart from ourselves and our existence”? He made the point that happiness is not pleasure. He went on to write, “The happiness for which my soul longs is not made up of fleeting moments (of pleasure), but of a single and lasting state.” Rousseau questioned the era of Enlightenment with its modern concepts and new age of aesthetics. He pondered, “What if the advance of modern civilization was the cause of this conflict, leading human beings not closer to their intended end but farther away, farther away from themselves?”
There’s something about Rousseau, Thoreau, and Maslow – beyond the fact that these three scholars have names that rhyme – that suggests the true purpose in life is to strip away the non-essential crap that tends to weigh us down (although they didn’t put it in those terms). Rousseau wrote, “Let us begin by re-becoming ourselves, by concentrating our attention upon ourselves, by circumscribing our soul with the same boundaries and limits that nature has given to our being; let us begin, in a word, by gathering ourselves here where we are.” McMahan, in the book, suggests that “this language, with its suggestion of self-exploration and retrieval – finding the self, collecting the self, returning the self – is so common to our modern vocabulary that it is easy to miss both the novelty and the essential strangeness of Rousseau’s words.” Rousseau – more than a quarter-millennium ago (yes, that’s more than 250 years) – wrote a very Maslovian statement when he penned, “As soon as man’s needs exceed his faculties and the objects of his desire expand and multiply, he must either remain eternally unhappy or seek a new form of being from which he can draw the resources he no longer finds in himself.” This is the dilemma of modern man – constantly striving for things just beyond our reach (that typically have some external motivation). Strangely, we pursue happiness when, in fact, we should settle into happiness as oppose to chasing it.
Such are the meandering thoughts of a writer/CEO/overworked American who hasn’t had solid food in nearly 70 hours (yes, I do remember my last meal very well…but don’t get me started as I’ve done a phenomenal job of not thinking about all my favorite San Francisco restaurants). On a fast, one has the time to do some serious self-reflection beyond how many inches will I lose from my waist. What’s most been on my mind is something I write about in the last chapter of PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. It’s the idea that we have one of three relationships with our work or how we make a living. As with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, the goal is to transcend the tangible base of the pyramid to find what’s more essential and personal at the intangible peak of the pyramid.
People with JOBS focus on the financial rewards of working more than the pleasure or fulfillment of what they’re doing. Many of these folks may find their true enjoyment outside of their 9-to-5 existence. Those with CAREERS focus primarily on growing their talent and advancement. While they may gain quite a bit of satisfaction in their work, it is often associated with the esteem that comes from external sources (like recognition or raises). The lucky few who pursue a CALLING find their work fulfilling in its own right, without regard for money or advancement. Those pursuing their calling would recognize Maslow’s statement in their own life: “One must respond to one’s fate or one’s destiny or pay a heavy price. One must yield to it; one must surrender to it. One must permit one’s self to be chosen.”
Each of these three approaches to work correspond to a different level of what I call the Transformation Pyramid (Sustain / Succeed / Transform) or the Employee Pyramid (Money / Recognition / Meaning) – to learn more about those, buy PEAK when it comes out in September.
How do you know which level you, your friends, family, or work associates would be placed on this pyramid? Based upon my fast and the reading I’ve been doing, it’s clear to me that happiness takes hold of us when we turn off the external antenna and tap into the internal. The fact is, a spirit greater than you may be calling to a particular path in life but you and I put up such a collection of distractions and excuses that we can’t even hear the whispers of this calling in our ear. Personally, that whisper has become a shout for me lately as the mud-wrestling between my career and my calling has been entertaining (if you’re the observer) but grueling.
Given that this talk of job, career, calling, and just the basics of happiness have the risk of being vague, I created a test in PEAK for the reader to try and understand where they are in their life. Feel free to take the following test, although beware that your answers will be influenced by your current state of mind, which means you may want to take the test twice, at least one week apart, to really gauge your accurate score. Read each of the following statements and place a check next to the five that best describe your relationship with your current work. Be careful, as it’s easy to think broadly about how certain statements SHOULD reflect your work life. What we’re looking for here are the statements that actually reflect your work life today:
1. While I enjoy what I do at work and am very good at it, I often feel like I’ve “topped-out” and I have to look elsewhere – my home, my spiritual life, my friends, my hobbies, my community service – for inspiration or fulfillment.
2. I tend to lose myself in my work. I just feel like I’m in the “flow” and I lose all sense of time.
3. I like what I do, but I don’t expect a lot from my work. It just provides me what I need to do the other more important things in my life. I enjoy my leisure life more than my work life.
4. My work truly makes a difference in the world.
5. The greatest experience I have at work is when I’m truly recognized by others for what I’ve accomplished.
6. If I had to choose between receiving a 10% raise at work or finding a new best friend at work, I would probably choose the raise.
7. I quite often feel like the work I’m doing is coming from some source bigger than me. I’m just channeling this energy or this talent and I’m quite often amazed by its power.
8. I’m often not that excited to go to work on Monday morning.
9. My goal in life is to rise to the top of my field.
10. There are moments when I think to myself, “If I were independently wealthy, I’d probably still be doing this work.” I do what I do because I just love it.
11. I’ve thought pretty deeply about where my work will take me the next ten years and what I need to do to excel in this field.
12. I’m pretty conscious to use my vacation time and sick days off so that I can create more balance and ensure that work doesn’t dominate my life.
13. I often feel like my work allows me to show the “real me.” My work lets me use my deepest creative gifts.
14. I think work is overrated when you consider what percentage of our lives we spend working as compared to enjoying life. I don’t think much about work when I’m not there.
15. I will do what it takes to become a success in my work.
Okay, I know that wasn’t easy. You may have had either a hard time trimming down to just five, or you may have found it difficult finding five statements that represent your perspective on your work. Here’s how we’ll score them. The following statements reflect someone who has a “job” perspective: 3, 6, 8, 12, and 14. The “career” statements are: 1, 5, 9, 11, and 15. And, the “calling” statements are: 2, 4, 7, 10, and 13.
How many did you have in each category? Your dominant category will tell you a lot about your relationship with your current work. If your dominant category wasn’t “calling,” don’t be alarmed, as most people find their calling outside of their work—whether it’s as a Girl Scout leader, a gardener, a tri-athlete, a devoted friend, or an ardent political activist. The big question you need to ask yourself – and you don’t have to go on a half-week fast to figure this out (and credit to poet Mary Oliver for a portion of my phrasing) – is “Left to your own choice with no external influences, what would you do with this one precious life you’ve been given?” Or think even bigger, “What’s the legacy you’ll leave long after you’re gone?”
With those audacious questions hanging in the air, I’m off to pursue my calling of this very moment: a deep-tissue detox massage.
June 17th, 2007
June 6, 2007
I’m sitting on the plane on my way home from one of my favorite places in the world, New York City. Nearly 25 years ago, I was a young, blond 22-year old living at 86th and Riverside working at Morgan Stanley for the summer. I felt like a country bumpkin who was fascinated by the grandiosity of both the vertical and horizontal visuals. This is where my summer-long landlord told me, “Bucko, there’s thousands of millionaires in Manhattan who’ve made their fortune in exactly the same fashion. They focused on a six square block area, got to know all the real estate values within that area, and spent the rest of their life buying and selling their way into wealth.” Now, it was hard to take this landlord, Stanley, all that seriously as he typically wore a torn white tee-shirt that was three sizes too small and usually had some remnants of breakfast in his needed-to-be-trimmed mustache. But, this wisdom stays with me to today and may be part of the reason I’ve always focused Joie de Vivre on small geographic areas – initially, just San Francisco for our first 12 years, then the Bay Area, and most recently, the whole state of California.
Whenever I go back to NYC, I’m flooded with nostalgic memories from that summer and from the three dozen or so trips I’ve taken there since I lived there. I remember the first time I walked into Ian Schrager’s Paramount Hotel in a just-starting-to-improve Times Square area in the later 80s. I’d just opened my first boutique hotel, The Phoenix (just about 3-4 years after I was living in NYC…hard to believe), and I wanted to come and see what all the hoopla was about. Ian was quickly becoming the entrepreneur most identified with the new boutique hotel trend and the Paramount was his most ambitious project yet with its pill-box sized rooms with the enormous headboards with replicas of art masterpieces printed on them. It almost seems quaint and kitsch given how far boutique hotel design has come since then.
So, here I am at a hotel conference at the Marriott Marquis almost across the street from the Paramount. So, of course, I needed to do one of my investor meetings over at the Paramount just for nostalgia’s sake. Ian no longer owns the Paramount. In fact, Ian no longer operates Morgans Hotel company, the public company that kept Ian’s empire going once he stepped down to do his own thing. Morgans has sold the Paramount, supposedly to the Hard Rock Hotel folks but they are just operating it as is for now. The strangest thing about my 90 minutes in the Paramount was the time warp that this fading boutique hotel exudes. It’s twenty years later and, guess what, the average guest in the still sort-of-cool lobby is about twenty years older than who stayed here back in its heyday. There were a few grandparents hanging out in the lobby…it felt a little like a seniors bus tour had just pulled up. There were clearly some retired German tourists with vouchers. And, I’ll be damned but all they played was great 80’s hits including one of my favorites by the Flock of Seagulls. I guess this is what happens to a boutique hotel that is put out to pasture. A little sad given that probably 100 new boutique hotels have opened in Manhattan since the Paramount opened its doors, but for those of you who have a thing for 80’s music or for people in their 80s, it’s a great little habitat.
I do my cross country trip to this boutique hotel Mecca every early June for this NYU Hotel Investment Conference where I hang out with 2,000 folks who live, breathe, and sleep the hospitality Business. There’s a reason I capitalized the B but not the h. It’s sad but this annual invest-a-thon is stocked like a field with wolves when prey is on the loose. There are no workshops on “How to Kill Your Guests With Kindness” but there are quite a few on “How to Make a Killing in Hotel Investing.” I’m once again nostalgic for that day when people entered this industry because they were people-pleasers enamored with the idea of taking care of guests far away from home. Those people still exist, but they don’t tend to come to these conferences.
Fortunately, I was able to make my way through this pack of wolves using a technique I write about in PEAK. Basically, I believe there are three kinds of investors: transactional investors, relationship investors, and legacy investors. The transactional investors are in the survival mode at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs pyramid. They are purely focused on the metrics of return on investment. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re an entrepreneur like me, that means you need to be careful with these folks as they may have a very short-term philosophy of investing. Up one level of the pyramid is the relationship investor who smartly realizes that the scarce commodity in the long-run isn’t necessarily the deal that makes you a fortune but it’s the relationship with an entrepreneur or company. So, with relationship investors, once you sell a business (or in my case a hotel), the relationship doesn’t end as the investor and the entrepreneur look for the next thing to do together. There are a lot of sheep in wolves’ clothing at this conference….those fellas that will take you out for a drink, smoke a cigar with you, pat you on the back and share a laugh….they’re you’re best friend as they’re trying to convince you they should be your investor, but some of them revert back to the wolf (or the bottom of this Investor Pyramid…just focusing on the transaction) once you’ve gotten in bed together. Thought it was a marriage, came to realize it was a one night stand….an entrepreneur can get jaded if that happens enough. Sounds a little like Sex in the City, doesn’t it?!
Then, there are the legacy investors…the white knights of the conference. As is true in the rest of our lives, white knights are scarce. Legacy investors may be focused on the return on investment and on creating a long-term relationship, but they’re also focused on the long-term benefit that is created by this investment. They are self-actualizing investors because they are able to see what their investment does to make a better world – whether it’s improving a community, creating a socially responsible product, or betting on an entrepreneur who is going to change an industry. White knights were clearly in short supply this year. But, at least it meant I was spending my days hanging out with the wolves.
For those of you who want to learn more about these three kinds of investors, check out chapters 10-12 in my upcoming book PEAK which is available in September but can be pre-ordered now on Amazon.
June 7th, 2007
May 31, 2007
One of my friends once reminded me, “The moment you give up the expectation that things (or people) will be perfect is the moment when your life will be so much happier.” Good advice…maybe it’s something we should remind our hotel guests.
I had a less than perfect experience in a hotel recently that I thought I’d share. I don’t like to beat up on my fellow hoteliers as, God knows, there are enough customers with a little extra emotional baggage who are world-classin their “beating up” skills. But, I thought my recent experience at the Anaheim Marriott was instructive.
Marriott is a fine company–sort of boring, but they usually get the details right and they have a long and rich history of being very employee- and customer-focused. I’m here in the Disney orbit to make a keynote speech at the Southern California Hotel & Lodging Conference. So, I order room service this morning and the server shows up efficiently–but unfortunately while I’m in the shower. I rush out to get the door, looking for a bathrobe….you’ve got to believe that a four-star hotel like this has bathrobe, right? No bathrobe. I show up at the front door in a towel. The room service attendant gives me an odd look and asks if he can enter the room. I apologize for showing so much skin and mention that I couldn’t find a bathrobe. He says tersely, “you’ll have to call housekeeping…I don’t know why we don’t have bathrobes.” I look at the $20 skimpy parfait and small tumbler of orange juice (I know, I know, room service is painfully expensive at nearly all hotels…I’m sorry) and look at the bill a little more closely. I see there’s a 20% service charge, which is fine, but there’s also a $2.50 delivery charge. I ask the attendant why are they charging a delivery charge for room service as it should be built into the prices. He sheepishly says “I guess we’re just trying to make as much money as possible.” Of course, when I read the room service menu bleery-eyed, I’d missed the very small print that did say they charge for both delivery and gratuity. OK, OK, a hotelier shouldn’t complain about such things but this attendant really seemed to have no care about my bathrobe request or delivery charge inquiry.
So, now I sit here with the bed throw over my shoulders writing this musing. I’m remembering back to last night when I checked in and the passive and socially disconnected front desk clerk gave me a robotic overview of the hotel. I asked about Wi-Fi and was amazed to find out this behemoth of a convention hotel doesn’t have it. Found out they charge $10 for an internet connection (most of our hotels don’t charge, but I think the strangest irony is that more expensive hotels charge for the connection while less expensive hotels don’t…for example, I don’t think Marriott Courtyard charges but the more expensive full-service Marriott’s do…this doesn’t make sense). Long story short, this hotel–from its
1980’s-style armoire in the guest room to its artwork that looks like it was purchased at Wal-Mart to the complete lack of warmth I’ve seen in the staff–shows that much of the hotel industry has devolved into one big personality-less transaction. Fortunately, my keynote address today is about how the boutique hotel segment of the industry is giving the big chains a run for their money…based upon my experience here at the Marriott, I’m confident about our prospects.
I want to segue into talking about the emotional connection that is created with customers. We are launching a new Joie de Vivre Hotels website tomorrow that’s pretty revolutionary. It’s all about engaging in a relationship with our customers. It’s not just the new graphics (although I love the new logo signifying the Joie de Vivre heart). It’s the California Connect part of our site (very Web 2.0) where people can connect with each other based upon common interests revolving around the California travel experience. Check out the cool People Map that allows you to see which people in the JDV online community are most similar to you and how you can learn interesting hidden treasures from them. Of course, we still have Yvette the Hotel Matchmaker, but she’s now a person and not a cartoon. She still provides a mass customized method of connecting you to the hotels, locals, and things to do that perfectly fit your personality. Our “JDV Gives” portion of the site allows you to understand which specific grassroots non-profits each of our hotels supports (each General Manager has annual philanthropic giveaway goals just like they have net income goals). All in all, this website is really about creating a community around how to experience California in a way that ideally suits who you are.
Since the dawning of hotel websites a decade ago, hotels have gotten better and better at making their product look good on the web…better graphics, better reservations capabilities, better information. But, in many ways, most hotels are stuck in the thinking that their website is just an electronic brochure and booking engine. Once again, they’re too focused on just the transaction, not the relationship. A few hotel companies have tried to move beyond the transaction. Sheraton has spent $20 million on their new “belong” campaign and what they consider to be a Web 2.0 website, yet from what I can see, all the website does is allow guests to upload photos of their experiences at a Sheraton along with their brief description of their time at the hotel and in the city. It’s just a more personal approach to the transaction — it’s definitely not truly creating community. Furthermore, Hilton launched an expensive and glitzy PR campaign around their new slogan “BE HOSPITABLE.” Those marching orders haven’t resonated all that well as I don’t see a new Hilton-focused community naturally rising up around this mantra. It just feels like some failed attempt to try and make a huge worldwide transaction-driven company look a little more personal.
OK, enough of my ranting. In sum, people aren’t stupid and they know what’s authentic and what’s not (an interesting observation given that I’m in the shadow of the Magic Castle here in Anaheim). The real magic is in how you create a culture that truly cares. Southwest Airlines has done it. Whole Foods Market has done it. Starbucks has done it. But, all these big hotel chains seem to be putting more energy and money into how they can look like they are personal and emotionally connected to you when, in fact, they aren’t investing in their people and culture to assure that this is true on a person-to-person basis with their customers.
June 2nd, 2007
