Page 144 - The New Gold Standard

PRINCIPLE 3: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU
this feedback, a full-time senior management position was cre-
ated to oversee the development of a formal social responsibility
program. The program began with identification of key environ-
mental and community involvement objectives, uniform criteria
to guide the socially responsible actions of hotels throughout the
Ritz-Carlton company, and strategies for measuring the impact
of these actions. The success of that program, called Commu-
nity Footprints, is discussed in Chapter 11.
When it comes to benchmarking best organizational prac-
tices, John Timmerman emphasizes that it’s important to not
limit comparisons to firms within your own industry. “When we
first started our quality journey, we would see something that we
thought our business needed, then implement a solution, and if
the customer liked it, we would keep it. We called it ‘painting it
blue.’ Then we received our first feedback report from Baldrige,
and it stated that we did a good job at identifying and manag-
ing guest complaints, but we didn’t necessarily have a method to
prevent the problems that led to the occurrence of the com-
plaints. That forced us to go outside Ritz-Carlton and monitor
other industries. For example, a lot of our breakthroughs in
process management have come from benchmarking manufac-
turing and aerospace industries.”
When Ritz-Carlton studies other businesses, it takes a disci-
plined and strategic approach, and the most common way it
mines for best practices of other companies is through multiday
site visits. For example, in 2007 a member of senior leadership at
Ritz-Carlton spent three days on site at both Cisco and Corning.
These businesses were chosen based on their reputation for driv-
ing organizational change and for their expertise concerning in-
novation (an area identified as one of Ritz-Carlton’s Key Success
Factors). Those who attended these site visits then brought back
their findings and incorporated those results with the observations
of others who had done similar innovation benchmarking visits
at other companies. As a result, Ritz-Carlton developed a new in-

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