The Evolution of Leadership and Purpose | Full Speech

So welcome to day two of ilc Although it feels like we're already halfway through the day, so really, really excited about this day. Yesterday we had a sneak peek into the exciting future of the company. Thank you so much for all of your engagement. The excitement was really palpable throughout the day. Today we're going to be talking about how do we achieve that future and through the strength of culture and leadership. And I have to say, I was really reflecting yesterday. I joined four seasons January 2020 five minutes before the pandemic started. And so that was a really interesting time for me and in my own leadership and what a crash course in the culture of Four Seasons. It was something I'd never ever seen or experienced before.

Honestly, it will go down in a chapter of Four Seasons that even through the most traumatic, most difficult time in this company's history, our people and our leadership supported each other, supported our guests, supported our community communities. It was just really, really remarkable. And it wasn't even just like baseline support, it was elevated support. And actually what we accomplished in that time set us up for where we are today. We did crisis management and we did some things that really set us up strategically. So just really remarkable and a testament to the leadership of each and every one of you in the room. It is just truly, truly impressive.

So, looking to the future, we have a real opportunity to amplify purpose that we talked about yesterday. We have an opportunity to evolve our leadership, evolve our culture. Today is a bit of a focus on around that. It's going to have a bit of a different feel than it did yesterday. We're going to spend some time reflecting. We're going to be spending some time going inwards. We're going to do a little bit of self development so it will feel a little bit different than it did yesterday. We are super excited. We have two phenomenal world class speakers that are going to be joining us. I mean, I'm just blown away that we have them here to be able to talk to us about culture, about purpose, about leadership. So it's going to be really fun and engaging and different than yesterday. And I promise your feet won't hurt as much. And so.

I had to change my shoes. So Christian and I are super, super excited, excited about kicking off today. And with that, I am going to turn it over to Christian.

No, no, you go first.

All right, thank.

Thank you for being here. So this is super exciting because I'm not going to introduce Simon because everybody knows who Simon is, but it's super exciting because Simon has not done this since the beginning of the pandemic. And he will probably not do this again because he's stopped doing public engagements in terms of speaking. And he can probably explain why, but he did this because.

He loves us. He loves you guys. He loves what you do. He loves the company.

And I will tell a story because it's a story that I think is relevant.

Of how we met. So we met. Do you remember when he did the pop down in Miami during Art Basel? Some of you were involved. And we're there. It was a cool event. And we invited David Copperfield to come. Sarah. Sarah's there. So I invited David Copperfield and it was like, david Copperfield, okay, great. And then David invited Simon to join. So Simon comes with David. David Koper, you know, putting his shirt down and he's coming through the boat and everybody's. Every time somebody would come come up towards him, he'd be ready to put his hand out to shake. And people go to Simon and say, it's great that you're here. And David couple would be standing there like.

I was the one who was invited. I should have never invited him. But needless to say, you're a bit of a kind of rock star at Four Seasons as well. And we're lucky because we had the opportunity to have Mr. And Mrs. Sharp with us last night. And Mr. Sharp is a rock star in the company as well. So we got two rock stars now.

It's a lollapalooza.

It's a lollapalooza. Yeah. So super proud. As I've told you, we spent yesterday all day reconnecting. It's the first time reconnect in five years.

And as you know, there's been a bit of a disruption over the past couple years, to say the least. No travel. So I know you just. You just got here, right? And it's one of the first international trip you've done in a while. So how did that feel?

Yeah, this is the second international trip I've taken since pre Covid. Since 2019. I still keep saying last year and mean 2019.

The first one, I went to London and Paris and Stockholm and I got Covid in Stockholm. Those bastards.

But this trip has been. Has been wonderful as well. It's wonderful. It's nice to be on the road again. I mean, not for work. It's nice to be traveling again is what I mean.

And I mean you the process of traveling and getting to a hotel like this, anything change in your perception versus prior to. To Covid.

I mean, you know, some people. I have to say, I love wearing masks. I think it's the best thing in the world. It's like you're Sears. Oh, yeah. I love it. I wore a mask on my flights. I think it's the best thing in the world. It's nothing to do with COVID It's. I don't want your cold. I don't want your cough. I don't want your flu. You know, I've gotten sick so many times being on planes, that now that the sort of social acceptance in the west to wear a mask, you know, you have to consider the difference between the east and the West. The east, if you're sick, you wear a mask to prevent other people from getting sick. In the west, we wear masks to prevent getting sick from you. You know, I mean, I think the east has something figured out that we don't. This is sort of public service. But anyway, I still love. Yeah, I'm all about it.

I think you should join our lead with care.

Yeah.

Program. Dr. Zinneman is going to be very happy to reach them.

Yeah, I'm big into service. If you're sick, wear a mask. I think it's a great idea.

So, obviously.

The pandemic of the past two years has been.

Obviously, a huge disruptor. Hospitality has been impacted more than many other industries, as you know. And this team here has done an incredible job, not only surviving, but really thriving through it. But from a leadership skills perspective, how you lead people post pandemic, what do you think are some of the big shifts and big changes that we have to adjust to as leaders as we lead our teams in this new world.

When Covid hit, it was fun to sit back and watch the leadership reactions of organizations, and it was inspiring to see that whether people were good leaders or bad leaders, whether they were effective or ineffective prior to Covid, they all. Most of them leaned back on their own humanity. You know, where it was normal for people to pick up the phone and say, are you okay? Is your family okay? We had more patience. You know, if somebody was struggling and their kids were struggling or had a sick family member, we were okay. You know, we sort of allowed them to take time and. And for me, the joy in that was that's just good leadership. It's a shame that it took a pandemic for people to learn how to care about each other. And I really hope that those skills that people use naturally continue after Covid. Sadly, I'm sure a lot of them will forget, and.

A lot of Just what I consider good leadership ideals happened organically. So another one was, I talk about this idea of.

The worthy rival. So I don't believe in the sense of competition. We live in a world where there's no such thing as winning business. It doesn't exist.

Where two organizations who sell basically the same product for basically the same price, basically the same quality, can both be wildly successful simultaneously. There's no winning. And so when companies talk about their competition, to me it doesn't make sense, because competition, A competitor is another player you want to try and beat, which means you spend too much time focusing on what they're doing, and you spend too much time comparing arbitrary metrics. Whether it's profits or revenues or market share or number of properties or number of employees or whatever it is, they're arbitrary. You get to pick what you're making the comparison. And you're all proud of yourself when you win at the end of the year. But the game doesn't end.

I prefer the concept of a worthy rival. And a worthy rival is another. They may or may not be in your industry, but it's another player in the game who does one or many things better than you. In other words, their strengths reveal to you your weaknesses, and you can study them, you can be grateful for them, but try competing against them is. Is pointless. But the whole idea is that the only true competitor in the game of business is yourself. How do we improve what we're doing and learn from those who do similar things to us rather than trying to beat them? And one of the things that I saw when Covid struck, which I found so fascinating, is everybody was so preoccupied with their own survival that the total number of companies that had any kind of presentation about our competitive threats was zero. Nobody was worried about their competitors because they were just trying to survive. Well, that's correct. That is the right mentality in a good market or a bad market, which is, how do we. Even if times are good, how do we survive for 50, 100, 150 years rather than how do we maximize this year and then blow all the wealth at the end of the year? You know.

So some of those things that Covid sort of revealed are really good leadership skills that I hope stay way beyond Covid.

Yeah. And so what are some of the. You know.

What are some of the change that we. That companies need to make to have this more. This less competitive approach and more. I guess it's what you write about in the infinite, infinite game, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What.

What does that look like? How Does a leadership team like this think about, well, how do we focus on what we can do better versus how we can beat our competitor?

Right. Well, as I said before.

You can pick your own worthy rivals. You can pick any company for any reason and say they're better than us. What can we learn from them? I'll give you a real life story that really captured this for me and it's in the book, but I'll tell it to you.

I spoke at a education summit for Microsoft, and then a few months later, I was invited to speak at an education summit for Apple at the Microsoft Summit. This is back in Steve Ballmer days. In the Microsoft Summit, the vast majority of the presentations by the executives spent most of their time talking about how to beat Apple. At the Apple Summit, 100% of the presentations were how to help teachers teach and how to help students learn. One was obsessed with beating their competition, the other was obsessed with advancing their mission.

At the end of my talk at Microsoft, they gave me a gift. They gave me the Zune when it was a thing. This was Microsoft's response to the ipod. And this little piece of technology, I have to say, was really, really very, very good. It was quite a good little piece of technology. It didn't work on an Apple, so I couldn't use it. That's a different problem. But it was very good. So at the end of my Apple talk, I was sharing a taxi with an Apple executive and I couldn't help myself. I just had to stir the pot. And I turned to him, I go, you know, Microsoft gave me their new Zune and it is so much better than my ipod touch. And he turned to me and he said, I have no doubt. And the conversation was over.

Because he understood this was an infinite minded organization. He understood that sometimes your competitor will do something better than you and sometimes you'll be better than them. There's no such thing as winning or losing. There's only a head and behind. And where Microsoft was obsessed with beating Apple, Apple was obsessed without doing itself. And so the great irony is just a couple years after that, Apple released the iPhone. So where Microsoft was obsessing with how to make a better ipod, Apple was onto the next thing, didn't even care. And that's the whole idea, which is absolutely study and learn from the other players. You see, I don't even call them competitors. The other players in your industry see what they're doing better. Like I said, it reveals your weaknesses and say, we can do better than ourselves, grow. Eventually they no longer become worthy of comparison anymore because you advance yourselves. But the whole idea is Apple was thinking about what they could do next, not how they could beat Microsoft to get more market share for an ipod.

So learn from others and how you can be better.

Absolutely. Like I said, their strengths reveal to your weaknesses and that's a gift.

So let's switch topic and we're amongst friends here so we can be fully transparent. So one of the areas of opportunity that we have when we look at our employee engagement service is and it's surprising to me because of our culture is trust. And especially at the mid management level. And we had conversation about this. But you talk a lot about trust and the importance of trust within organizations. And I think that I'm super proud of the culture that we have that goes way back. Mr. Sharp was talking about the golden rule well before anybody wrote about company cultures.

I think we also very genuine as a company, as leaders. And yet here we have this opportunity. Right. Especially with our kind of hourly line employers. Any advice for us in terms of.

What we could think about doing differently?

So we have to remember trust is a feeling.

It's not a command or an order. Trust me, it doesn't work.

Trust me.

It's like a used car dealer.

It's a feeling. And that feeling comes from people feeling psychologically safe. You know, I use the story of Noah to help tell this, which is, you know, managers, not just his manager stop by to say, are you okay? Is there anything you need on a regular basis? And he said it himself versus Caesar's Palace. He says, only at the Four Seasons do I feel I can be myself. His charming, funny, you know, quirky self that the Four Seasons. One of the things that I love about you is, you know, when you get into luxury hospitality, it starts to feel like putting on white gloves and it starts to feel tight, you know. And your definition of luxury is the opposite, which is it's much more human. And you allow for people not to follow a script, but you allow them to be themselves and interpret what, what it means to care their own way, which I absolutely love. The heart hospitality, it starts to feel like putting on white gloves and it starts to feel tight. And your definition of luxury is the opposite which is it's much more human and you allow for people. Not the hardest part about it. And.

This time is more difficult now than ever before because people are psychologically burnt out, people are exhausted, people are uncertain, anxiety is an all time high. And young people who are coming into the workforce who've never really Had a job before.

They have an expectation not to follow a script, but you allow them to be themselves and interpret what it means to care their own way, which I absolutely love the hardest part about it, and this. This time, that is almost impossible to reach. So, for example, if you go back to, like the 1950s, the 1960s, we got our sense of purpose from church. We got our sense of community from bowling league. We got our sense of. We had barbecues on the weekends with our neighbors. And work was loyal to us, and we were loyal to work. We worked there until we got a gold watch.

But work was primarily a place that we got money to pay our bills. There's an entire generation now who, when I talk about the gold watch, they don't know what I'm talking about. There is no such thing anymore between loyalty from a company or loyalty to a company. And we can thank Jack Welch for that, for 30 years of destroying that kind of thinking. It's true. I've made it my career to undo everything he did.

And now.

Church attendance is way down. There's no such thing as bowling leagues anymore. We don't really know who our neighbors are. And so we're looking to work to provide all these things for us. We're looking to work that you have to give me a sense of purpose. You have to give me a sense of community. This is where my social life has to be. Now, you have to agree with all of my politics as well. And the newest one that's really since COVID you have to be my place for therapy as well. Right? And much like the unreasonable expectations people are putting on romantic partners, no one can live up to the standard that you're hoping. From me, I think that the standard that especially young people are putting on, the expectations on a place of employment, on a work family, are impossible for any company to meet. And we've seen it in our company, and I've seen it in other companies as well, where, for example, and again, particularly young people, but not exclusively.

Because the stress is high. And remember the way work used to work. And it's slightly different for you because it's still mostly in person. But the way work used to work, which is you go to work and then after work, you go out with your friends and you complain about work. Right? Which is totally healthy.