If you believe, which I do, that the underlying philosophy is to serve customers for any type of travel need they have, anywhere geographically within reach, we weren’t doing that as well; we had huge opportunities in terms of being able to serve customers better.
So the brands were good, but not great, and last but not least from a growth point of view, our growth was anaemic, particularly internationally ... we were anywhere from fourth to eighth in terms of where we stood in pipeline rooms under construction.
We had the number one brand in terms of customer awareness in every region of the world yet we weren’t doing anything about it, so the fourth of the priorities was really to accelerate growth.”
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In a nutshell then, Nassetta had four priorities: align the culture and organisation, improve basic performance, enhance and strengthen and expand the brands, and then expedite growth.
Central to achieving change in all of these areas — and the revolution that Nassetta thinks will sustain and develop the business going forward — was creating a company culture that all Hilton Worldwide’s 300,000 employees would buy into.
“It wasn’t that we didn’t have culture, it was that we had lots of cultures, the companies had never truly been integrated or aligned,” explains Nassetta. “I do a lot of things, I work on deals and talk to the press and our people, but the primary thing I do, the most important thing I do, is really set the tone for the culture.
It actually is quite simple, hard to execute, but the concept is really simple, which is getting intense alignment around the principles of who you are, how you behave and what your most important priorities are, and when I say intense, I mean intense — everybody from a housekeeper to the most senior person in every geography around the world, 300,000 people, [must] know what you are doing. And the power of the force of will of all of those people headed in the same direction is massive.”
The key, he says, was to establish “the four corners — mission, vision, values, key priorities” and “distribute leadership out throughout the organisation.” He explains: “The businesses that succeed in the next 10 or 20 years are going to be the businesses that do that well.
Businesses that try and centralise too much decision making in one place, wherever that is, in my opinion are going to struggle, but having those principles — the mission, vision, values, and what those key priorities are — well established and having people really aligned around those is critical, or in a big organisation it would be anarchy.
“When you are running a company that has 300,000 people in 100 countries, you can’t know everything, you can’t do everything and to the extent you think you do and you can, you will fail,” asserts Nassetta.
“The fact is your teams on the ground, on the front line, are better suited, have more knowledge and information with which to make good decisions to serve your customers, to ultimately propel the business.”
He speaks here not as a finance or real estate expert, but as a hotelier. Nassetta’s first job as a teenager was in the engineering department of a Washington DC hotel, “literally at the lowest level”.
“My primary job at that time was the sort of job of plunging toilets and doing other things that nobody else wanted to do,” he laughs.
“It’s a great way to figure out behind the walls what’s going on in a hotel. These are very complex businesses, they are lots of moving parts, the work is very hard, and I think the best way to start in any business, is to start from the ground up, to build up an understanding in a way that you can relate to the people who are doing all this hard work.”
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