You are Only Competing Against Yourself

I mean, you play the infinite game for the good of the game. Right, Right. Which is you're in the hospitality industry for the good of the hospitality industry and for the good of all business. And the best companies, the ones we love and admire, right. They share, you know, it's. It's the ones who are protective, you know, of what they. Because they think it's a competitive advantage and what they don't. What they fail to recognize is implementation is the competitive advantage, not the idea itself. Execution is the competitive advantage, but the ability to share the things you believe in and the things you have figured out for the good of business. Because we don't just believe your employees should be treated well. We believe all employees should be treated well. You know, and if you figured things out. So I'll tell you a story. So Bob Chapman is the CEO of a company called Barry Wehmiller. It's a company I've written and spoken about quite a lot, especially in my book, Leaders Eat Last. Great guy. And you had the opportunity to meet Bob. Bob is one of those unique, remarkable leaders. And the way I met Bob is he'd read, start with why. And he sent me a letter and saying, I'm building the kind of company that you've written about. And I said, I want to meet you. And so we had lunch in Los Angeles, this famous lunch where we were scheduled for an hour and we both cleared our schedules and spent the next three hours together because we loved each other. And I didn't believe him. I said, I talk about an ideal. It's not realistic, it's a striving. He says, no, no, I have it. I said, well, I want to see it, to believe it. So he picked me up in his plane from New York and we flew. We spent three days flying around the country to all these different factories. And it's a manufacturing company, right? This is blue collar, some union, some non union manufacturing, right? And what I saw absolutely astonished me. It blew me away. I've never seen anything like it. And he didn't prepare anything. He let me roam the factory floor without any. I could talk to anybody. I could ask anybody any question I wanted. There was no window dressing. And I was absolutely blown away. And I'll just tell you one quick story that really exemplifies. And this one's, I haven't written or spoken about this one. So this one is. I haven't talked about this one. So they have a machine that was getting old, you know, this is a factory. Big machine. Yeah, that's Getting old and need to be replaced. Traditionally, how large machines are replaced is somebody in procurement fills out a list of requirements and then goes in the market to find a machine that fits a budget. Right. That's usually how it's done. That's not how they did it. They went to the factory floor, to the two guys who work on that machine. One who's pretty young, in his early 20s, one who's got more experience. Neither of them have college educations. I think one had a ged. And they said to them, you need to replace your machine. You have a budget of $750,000. Go. And these two guys travel around the country looking at new and never came back. Exactly. They now live in Tahiti.

They gave them a budget, not the money.

That was smart. They flew around the country, they looked at new and used machines, and the people selling the machines said they'd never seen anything like it. They'd never had anybody show up in. In overalls, climbing in the machine. Usually it's a guy in a suit showing up with a clipboard. They ended up spending $650,000. So they were really excited that they saved the company money, and that's their machine.

I can guarantee that machine will never break down. And the trust. And it makes perfect sense. But this is one of the things that Bob says. Bob says is we trust people who have college educations who work in a back office, and we don't trust people who don't have college educations. What about their education makes them trustworthy or they're untrustworthy? He says, I know some pretty dishonest MBAs, you know.

And that's one of the things that Bob did. But the point was, is I went on this wonderful tour with Bob, and then we finally went back to their corporate headquarters in St. Louis, and the team that had sort of built this culture was sitting around a table, and they were all looking at me like this, going, isn't this amazing? Like, we built what you wrote about. And I sat there and I said, I think you're the most selfish organization I've ever met in my entire life. And they all were sort of stunned that I would say that. I said, look, I think it's amazing what you've built. I think it's absolutely incredible. But how selfish of you that you only offer this thing, this kind of thing that You've built for 6,000 people. What about the millions of people who hate their jobs, who don't want to go to work every day? What are you doing for them? And it was from that conversation that Bob opened the doors. They now offer training, they now offer tours. Like Bob now. He wrote a book about it. He's now on the speaking circuit. He's out there, he's now a public figure, and he's promoting this new way of leading and this new way of thinking. Leader means other people follow what you do. And if your brand stands for something that people want to copy and you're leading the way, then clearly you are competing against yourself and not them. But let them compete against you. And I think that the Four Seasons is one of those brands, and I can't think of anyone in hospitality who has ever done that, who's ever reached outside of their own industry, that others want to be more like them.