The Contented Cow Blog

Building Workplaces That Work

Bill Catlette and I have been at the annual convention of the National Speakers Association this week in New York City. One of the highlights of the convention was a town hall style session with 2 titans of the travel industry, Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott Hotels, and Dave Barger, CEO of JetBlue Airways.

Bill and I often speak from the platform about these 2 companies, as exemplary companies to work for. Hearing their respective CEO’s speak made it easy to see why we do.

Some highlights, first from Marriott:

• Marriott’s parents, the hotel chain’s founders taught him “take good care of your employees, and they’ll take good care of your customers.”
• One key to the success of Marriott Hotels is training. Training represents an enormous proportion of the company’s time, attention, and money.
• Another key is providing opportunities for advancement. By far, most Marriott managers started in entry level positions in the chain’s hotels, and were motivated by the strong connection at Marriott between performance and promotion.
• Bill Marriott spends a huge amount of time circulating among his thousands of properties to see the people who work there. “I can’t make strategic decisions unless I know what’s going on, and I can’t do that if I’m not there.”

From JetBlue’s Barger:

• Barger recently took a 50% pay cut.  (He was asked about this, he didn’t bring it up. I know the person who asked the question, and he was not a plant.) “We’re going to be flying less, so our people will be earning less. So I should, too.”
• “This is not a fuel business. It’s a people business. What keeps me up at night is not the price of fuel. It’s how we motivate our people to deliver the best product, especially in these tough times.”
• “We don’t talk about ’survival’ at JetBlue; we talk about ‘winning’.”

As much as I was impressed by what these guys said, I was even more impressed by who they appeared to be. I left the session with the feeling that I had just spent 90 minutes in the presence of a couple of guys who were not only brilliant, but really nice, ordinary (though extremely wealthy, especially Marriott) folks.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and his co-author and business partner Bill Catlette, are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

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