Hilton’s Big Secret to Business Success

What do you do when you can’t get your department functioning at the level you need?  What do you do when little problems pop up randomly every day?  Could they have the same root cause that seems to manifest itself in a different way every time?  You don’t know.

If this sounds familiar, you’ll know how I felt a few years ago.  My department just wasn’t getting the job done; nothing dramatic, but it felt like the death of a thousand cuts. I tried every fashionable cure that the management gurus were spewing out.  Nothing worked.

Late one night I was driving home flipping stations on the radio.  An announcer said that they would be interviewing Conrad Hilton, and the famous hotel magnate would tell us his secret for being successful in business. 

“Conrad Hilton?!” I thought.  “Is he still alive?”  But I had nothing to lose.  I left the dial where it was.

When they brought him on, he sounded like he was dead.  His voice seemed to rumble up from a gravel pit.  The interviewer asked him how he grew the Hilton Hotel chain.  The old man droned on about his billions and his charitable contributions.  I watched the tail lights sparkling in the drizzle on my windshield.

Finally the critical question came.  “Well, Mr. Hilton.  Can you tell our audience what you consider to be the most important single thing that you did to make you successful in business?” I leaned toward the radio.

Silence.  Then the words began to scrape out of the radio.  “Remember to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub.”

“What!?”  I yelped into the rain.  “What kind of an answer is that?”  I punched the radio back to the rock n’ roll station and continued home for a cold dinner.

But over the next months my mind kept drifting back to Hilton and his big secret.  It made sense that if anyone, either the cleaners or customers, left the curtains outside the tub, water would ruin the ceiling of the room below when people took a shower.  The cost of repairs and lost rentals would be big.  But the secret to success in business??  No way. It was still a secret to me.

I was still getting nowhere improving my department.  Late one afternoon a canceled meeting allowed me to get out and talk to some of the people in my department.  I asked them what they thought about the changes we were making in the department. 

Their answers did not lift my spirits.  They understood the general thrust of the initiatives, but they were missing the details that were crucial to making them work.  After filling in the blanks for the employees, I climbed in the car and headed home in the dark.

My mind returned to Hilton’s big secret.  Then light started to seep through my thick skull.  “It’s the focus!” I yelled out.  “I’ve been focusing on the wrong thing.”  Hilton was trying to tell me that strategic plans could only take you so far.  The real determinant for success in business is how you execute those strategies; how you translate them into action by the people with their hands on the work.

The next day I postponed some of the initiatives I had planned to roll out to my department.  I needed to refocus our precious resources to connect the dots between our strategies and the employees with their hands on the work.  But the management staff had neither the time nor the energy to hold every employee’s hand and guide them through every detail of the improvements we were introducing into the department.  The employees weren’t keen to have us lean over their shoulders either. 

No, rather the key for us was to find a way to put systems in place to unite the project plans and the folks who would execute them. 

Next time:  the system we developed and how it worked at one of VCI’s customers.