THE BRIGHT LIGHT TURNS ON DURING THE DARK TIMES

December 17th, 2009

Why is it that many of us get our best ideas during the worst times?  During the last economic downturn, against all odds, my company, Joie de Vivre, grew into the country’s second largest boutique hotelier when most observers were writing our obituary.   After 15 years in business in 2001, we had grown into Northern California’s most prolific hotelier with twenty boutique hotels.  Yet, over the next three years, we suffered through the effects of a dot-com crash, 9/11, SARS, two wars, and a recession on the local hotel economy.  The Bay Area’s hotels experienced the largest percentage drop in revenues in the history of any U.S. metropolitan region since World War II.

With all of our hotels in the country’s most problematic region, one day I found myself in the local bookstore searching for some wisdom.  Slightly disoriented, I ditched the business section of the store and stumbled on the self-help section.  That’s where I became reacquainted with Abraham Maslow and his iconic Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, one of the world’s most famous psychological theories of human motivation.  I started reinterpreting Maslow’s work and looking at how Joie de Vivre could apply this to the higher, self-actualizing needs of our three most important constituencies: our employees, customers, and investors.

Based upon our positive experience in applying Maslow, I started studying actualizing companies – like Apple, Southwest Airlines, and Whole Foods Markets - and found that many organizations were either consciously or unconsciously using the Hierarchy of Needs in their business model.  As a result of this learning, I wrote PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow a couple of years ago and my company tripled in size to almost a quarter billion in annual sales.

“Joie de Vivre” and “deju vu” are both French phrases.  Our industry is feeling a lot of déjà vu these days as this financial collapse has led to a more than 20% decline in U.S. urban hotel revenues in the past year.   It ain’t easy experiencing two “once in a lifetime downturns” within the same decade.  But, once again, I’ve been turning to a little practical psychology to help our middle- and upper-level managers understand how they can use this painful experiencing to be their lesson of a lifetime.

Some of you may be familiar with Viktor Frankl’s legendary book, Man’s Search for Meaning, the real life story of his experience living in a concentration camp as an Austrian Jewish psychologist in World War II.  Frankl found that those who died quickly had lost hope and a sense of meaning and they tended to focus their attention on their suffering, while those who survived tried to find the meaning or learning in this awful situation.  If you were to distill this great book down to what I call an “emotional equation,” it would be Despair = Suffering – Meaning.  Just like in algebra, life is full of constants and variables with suffering being the constant in a concentration camp and meaning being the variable.  Life, and business, is all about where you place your attention.  Focusing on the meaning can reduce your despair.  Thankfully, the prison we experience is in our minds as there’s no barbed wire around our offices, but many of our company leaders have been freed from their silent suffering by remembering this emotional equation.

Seeing the profound effect this emotional equation had on our company’s psycho-hygiene, I started thinking about and teaching other philosophical and leadership wisdoms.  Here’s a few of the other ones we’re using in this downturn:

(1) Happiness = Wanting what you have ÷ Having what you want

Or, in other words, Gratitude divided by Gratification.  Sometimes, you have to appreciate what you have to create a little happiness instead of just focusing on what you want.  Getting off the aspiration treadmill for a short time can be healthy for you.

(2) Disappointment = Expectations – Reality

This is rule #1 with our customers.  Disappointment is the natural result of badly-managed expectations, so how are we marketing ourselves or delivering services in a fashion that allow reality to beat expectations?

(3) Workaholism = What are you running from ÷ What are you living for

Given the 24/7/365 nature of the hotel business, it’s easy for our managers to clock a huge number of hours in their work.  So, we need to make sure our managers are being conscious about what’s driving them: fear of something else (like marital problems) or love of what they’re doing.

(4) Great Leadership = Humility x Ambition

Business author Jim Collins wrote about this in Good to Great, the idea that “Level 5 Leaders” are full of “hum-bition.”  The best leaders are a mix of down-to-earth humanism and over-the-top will power.

(5) Calling = Pleasure ÷ Pain

The difference between a job and a calling is how you feel after 8-10 hours working.  If it’s a job, you likely are a little depleted by it.  If it’s a calling, you’re energized.  Our goal as leaders is to find employees who are in their perfect habitat to live their calling.

Entry Filed under: Miscellaneous