Page 140 - The New Gold Standard

PRINCIPLE 3: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU
the opportunity to engage our guests with anticipatory service
or create enduring guest memories.” Rather than taking a top-
down approach to quality, in which leaders create processes and
impose them on staff, Ritz-Carlton has built their processes
largely through inquiry.
To keep its sight on the customer, Ritz-Carlton leadership
looks beyond daily operational concerns to garner data that can
be used to benefit all customers, employees, managers, business
partners, and stockholders. Rather than focusing on incremen-
tal improvements in existing internal processes, corporate lead-
ers pay attention to the voice of their customers, the wisdom of
world-class businesses, the ideas and feelings of their Ladies and
Gentlemen, the input of their business partners, and the wishes
of the hotel owners. Wide-ranging and disciplined listening pro-
grams help them to avoid building their business from the “in-
side out” (developing a plan of how they think their hotels
should be run and imposing their will on all those the company
touches). The leadership of Ritz-Carlton, instead, seeks feedback
from many teachers as they go about continually and respon-
sively adapting and improving their customer-reaching processes.
In the end, by making Ritz-Carlton not be about the leaders but
instead about those the leaders serve, the company has greatly
prospered.

C Starting with a Look to the D
Excellence of Others

In the early 1990s, executives at Ritz-Carlton looked outside
their business to drive internal process innovation. They did this
by seeking input from world-class businesses such as Motorola,
Westinghouse, Xerox Corporation, Federal Express, and IBM,
and they gathered this information largely through the Malcolm
Baldrige National Quality Award evaluation process.
The prestigious Baldrige Award had its genesis in response
to a 1980 NBC television documentary titled If Japan Can, Why

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