Books

How to hire a hotel desk clerk

February 12, 2011

I’m surprised by how casually some companies  hire.

Hiring matters. A lot.

Just ask Chip Conley, the founder and executive chairman of boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre.

“I chose that name because it’s hard to spell and hard to pronounce, and most people don’t know what it means,” he jokes.

Despite the name, Chip has made Joie de Vivre a big success because he focuses relentlessly on hiring the right people, and creating a workplace where they can grow and thrive. He’s the author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, an excellent management book based on the well-known hierarchy of needs of psychologist Abraham Maslow. (See my 2007 blogpost, Peak Performance.)

“The most neglected fact in business is that we’re all human,” Chip says.

Chip, who is 50, started Joie de Vivre right after he graduated from Stanford Business School. Joie de Vivre is now the  2nd largest boutique hotel company in the U.S. (behind Kimpton). It employ 3,500 people in 35 hotels, 19 restaurants and five spas. Last year, Chip sold a majority interest to a private equity firm run by John Pritzker of the Chicago family that used to own Hyattt.

I’ve known Chip for years. He’s always full of ideas  Last week, he gave a talk in San Francisco to the board of Net Impact. (Great organization, by the way: check it out here.)

Chip argued, as he does in Peak, that great companies succeed by meeting the highest expectations and desires of their workers and customers.

For workers, the base of the pyramid is money. That’s about survival.

Above money is recognition. That’s about listening to people, giving them opportunities to grow, applauding their accomplishments.

At the top of the pyramid is meaning. That’s about giving people the sense that they are making a contribution to the world, that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

“Your goal (as an employer) is to help people move up the pyramid,” Chip says.

You need to start with the right people. So, for example, when Joie de Vivre  interviews job candidates who want to work at the front desk a hotel  —they’re called hosts—they’re asked to talk about a time in the last month when they did something for someone else that made the other person happy, and made them happy, too.

It’s obvious why, right?

If making other people feel good makes you feel good, you’re going to like working as a front-desk clerk. You’ll greet every guest who approaches the desk with a smile, and genuinely look forward to helping them in any way you can.

If you don’t much like helping people, you’ll see the job as eight hours of drudgery and the guests will notice.

For the hotel, that’s the difference between repeat business and a disappointed guest.

For the desk clear, it’s the difference between a calling and a job, Chip notes.

“A calling energizes you,” Chip says. “A job depletes you.”

Chip’s been fortunate to find his calling as a hotelier, a writer and a speaker. Here he is, giving a TED talk.

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Is big business too powerful?

January 23, 2011

Corporate America has pretty much had its way in Washington for the past couple of years. Its CEOs and lobbyists got the Wall Street bailout. They got the auto bailout. They set the terms of the health care bill. They blunted financial regulation. They blocked climate legislation. If they were tied to the defense industry, they enjoyed a surge of military outlays. Of course they preserved the tax cuts for the rich. They did all of this, mind you, after the Democrats swept the 2006 and 2008 elections and gained control of  Congress and the White House.

Remarkable, isn’t it?

Now, with business-friendly Republicans in control of the House, the most powerful corporate lobbies—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers—have even more clout. They can, at minimum, stop just about anything they don’t like.

But they would be well advised to use their power sparingly.

I write this as a rational optimist, and as an unabashed believer in the power of business to do good—by creating jobs, generating wealth, satisfying people’s wants or needs, and enabling an unprecedented wave of economic growth during the past half century. (See China, cappuccino and cell phones, my first blogpost of 2011) But it’s hard for me to ignore the fact that the benefits of that growth are not being as broadly shared as they should be, at least here in the U.S., and that the reason for that, at least in part, is business’s outsized power in Washington.

The growth of inequality is especially troubling in the aftermath of the great recession. Wall Street is booming again, the stock indexes are up, corporate profits are growing…while the middle class and especially the poor—43.6 million of them, one in seven Americans—are being left behind. [click to continue…]

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Jeffrey Hollender: Life after laundry soap

January 18, 2011

For Jeffrey Hollender, the longtime chief executive of Seventh Generation, business has always been about more than selling laundry detergent and paper towels.

At Seventh Generation, Hollender looked for ways to do business better–better for customers and their health, better for its workers (who were also owners) and better for the environment.

Those efforts came to a abrupt halt in October when he was unceremoniously ousted by Seventh Generation’s board, which was forced to choose between Hollender and Chuck Maniscalco, the CEO he’d recruited as his replacement 18 months ago.

The story behind the falling out remains murky. Neither Seventh Generation nor Hollender have been willing to air their dirty laundry, presumably because their break-up agreement included a promise not to speak ill of one another.

Hollender broke his silence last week, not to talk about the past, but to discuss his future, which he says will involve business and political work to address social and environmental problems that he thinks are mostly getting worse.

“I’m very worried about where the country is headed,” he told me, when we spoke by phone.

Jeffrey, who is 56, divides his time between Burlington, Vermont, where he has lived for years, and New York, where he grew up. (Disclosure: Jeffrey and my wife Karen Schneider were high school classmates.)

So what’s next? [click to continue…]

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The surprising roots of Earthbound Farm

May 23, 2010

goodman_revDrew and Myra Goodman never planned to become farmers. Two kids from New York City,  they graduated from the same high school and made their way to northern California, where Drew went to UC-Santa Cruz, Myra to Berkeley. (She majored in “The Political Economy of Industrial Societies.”  Ah, Berkeley. ) Grad school was next on her agenda—Myra anticipated a career in international relations—but she and Drew decided to take a year off to live in a 600-square-foot home in rural Carmel Valley. “A romantic adventure,” she called it.

But, as John Lennon once wrote, “life is what gets in the way when you are making other plans.” Drew and Myra grew raspberries on a two-and-half acre plot, selling them first at a roadside stand, then to restaurants in nearby Carmel. They didn’t know much about farming, but because they didn’t like the smell of the chemical fertilizers and pesticides, they tried organic farming, guided by Rodale’s Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. They grew salad greens, too, and while they made only $9,800 in their first year, 1984, they decided that grad school could wait. And then wait some more.

earthboundfarmA quarter century later, their Earthbound Farm is America’s largest grower of organic produce. Drew and Myra were the first to sell the pre-washed bagged salads that are now on supermarket shelves everywhere, and they dominate that market. Today, Earthbound processes and markets more than 100 varieties of salads, vegetables and fruit, gathered from about 150 farmers who tend 35,000 organically-farmed acres from British Columbia to Mexico. Earthbound Farm products are available in 75% of supermarkets across the country, and the firm makes store brands for chains like Costco, Safeway and Trader Joe’s. Annual revenues top $400 million.

Talk about organic growth!

“We’ve been sprinting nonstop,” says Drew, just to keep up. Things eased up a bit lately after he  [click to continue…]

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Black swans, an oil spill, hubris and debt

May 9, 2010

Black_swan_family_2If there is one thing we can learn from the headlines of the past week or so – Market Plunge Baffles Wall Street, Size of Spill in Gulf of Mexico is Larger Than Thought, ‘Amateurish’ Bomb Defused in Times Square—it is that we cannot reliably forecast the future, that the world is bound to surprise us, frequently in unpleasant ways, and that, as the poet Robert Burns wrote, the best laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry.

Shit, as they say, happens.

And yet we keep on devising those well-laid schemes, don’t we? We extrapolate the future based on the past. We imagine that we can make useful economic forecasts (because now we have more data than we did before). We imagine that regulation will protect use from the meltdowns of markets (as well as off-shore oil drilling platforms and nuclear power plants). We imagine that the Department of Energy can lead us to a clean energy future, or that scientists can make geo-engineering safe. We imagine that we understand things better than we do. And we forget the words of that other poet, John Lennon, who wrote that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

So the timing is excellent for this week’s updated version of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which includes a new essay called “On Robustness and Fragility.”  I’ve haven’t read the essay yet, but Taleb discussed the book and much more with my friend Russ Roberts, the Hayekian economics professor, at EconTalk. Their 67-minute conversation is never dull. [click to continue…]

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Biotech and organic food: a love story

April 15, 2010

Pamela Ronald

Pamela Ronald

Earlier this week at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference about business and the environment, I led a conversation about food and agriculture during which a communications executive named David Kalson asked the question: Can organic food and transgenic food be part of the effort to make agriculture more sustainable? I answered “yes, I think so,” and referred him to an excellent book called Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food (Oxford University Press, 2008) by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak.

In the preface to the book, Sir Gordon Conway, the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, calls Tomorrow’s Table “a tale of two marriages.” The first is the marriage between Pamela, a scientist whose research focuses on the genetic engineering of plants, notably rice, and Raoul, a teacher and lifelong organic farmer. The second is the potential marriage of two techniques: Genetic engineering and organic agriculture, which now cannot work hand-in-hand because, at least in the U.S., rules governing organic farming prohibit genetic engineering of crops.

The conversation at Brainstorm reminded me to post the edited transcript of a (long-ish) interview that I recently conducted with Pamela Ronald, who is a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis. We talked about the book, her work on rice and what her family eats for dinner.

Marc: How and why did you get involved in the genetic engineering of crops?

Pamela: Genetic engineering is not really a discipline. It’s just a tool. I’m a research scientist. I do plant genetics. I became interested in genetics in college. I had a fantastic teacher and I got very interested in understanding how plants and microbes could communicate.

Gunther: Where was this?

Ronald: Reed College. I had spent a lot of time backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as I was growing up. I’ve always been interested in plant biology. My mother and grandparents were excellent gardeners and small-scale farmers.

Gunther: Well, then, how did your interest evolve into using, as you say, the tool of genetic engineering as opposed to conventional plant breeding? [click to continue…]

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Jeff Hollender: Greenwashing is getting worse

March 20, 2010

img_JeffreyToday’s guest post comes from Jeffrey Hollender, the founder, executive chairperson and chief inspired protagonist of Seventh Generation, which makes safe and environmentally-responsible products for the home. Jeff is energetic and multi-talented–he is an entrepreneur, the author of several books, including a brand-new one, The Responsibility Revolution, which he wrote with longtime journalist Bill Breen, a lively blogger at the Inspired Protagonist and an activist who sits on the board of Greenpeace USA. (He’s also a good guy and always has been, at least according to my wife; they went to high school together.) I’m looking forward to reading Jeff’s new book and will review it soon. In the meantime, here’s an edited and expanded version of a recent blogpost that he wrote about the challenges that face consumers who face an onslaught of green and sometimes misleading marketing.

As companies step up their spending on green marketing, the confusion about what’s truly green is getting worse.

For consumers, it’s a challenge to cut through the clutter and decide whether to buy green products or support green companies.

Here’s a guideline that is easy to follow:

We should absolutely not support green products from companies that use them to distract us from their larger negative environmental and social impacts. We need systemically green companies to address the challenges we face, not business-as-usual companies that hold up one green hand while hiding another toxic, CO2-emitting, waste-producing one behind their backs.

Two examples: [click to continue…]

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Why Stewart Brand’s new book is a must-read

January 5, 2010

Many books shaped my thinking about business, economics and the environment during 2009. Last year was the year that I discovered Nassim Nicholas Taleb and The Black Swan, to my great delight, as well as the year that I began to explore behavioral economics by reading Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. I enjoyed my friend Russell Roberts’ libertarian romance (yep) The Invisible Heart, and I learned a lot from The Myth of the Rational Market, a timely and readable history of the economics of markets by my ex-Fortune colleague Justin Fox.  The Good Soldiers by David Finkel is a searing up-close look at the surge in Iraq that should be read by any American citizen who wants to better understand the human costs of the wars being waged by our government.

SBjpg-filteredBut the book that I most want to recommend to readers of this blog is Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand. It’s brilliant, controversial, unconventional and lively. Nothing I read in 2009 changed my thinking more.

I’m not alone in my admiration for Stewart’s book. Paul Hawken calls it “likely one of the most original and important books of the century.…” Edward O. Wilson says it is “ominous and exhilirating.” Larry Brilliant says it is “an absolutely seminal work, extraordinarily well written, a tour de force of so many interconnected worlds and lives and studies.” Nice blurbs, no?

The praise is all the more remarkable because Whole Earth Discipline argues that we need nuclear power to combat global warming, that we need biotechnology to feed the world and that we need to take  geo-engineering seriously — ideas that are anathema to much, though not all, of the environmental movement that Stewart helped create roughly 40 years ago.

For those of you (younger readers) who aren’t familiar with his work, Stewart, who is a vigorous 72-year-old, is best known as the editor of Whole Earth Catalog, an influential compendium of all things countercultural, published in the late 1960s and 1970s, with a photo of the earth seen from space on its cover. After an LSD-induced experience that got him thinking about the curve of the earth, Stewart campaigned to have NASA release the picture. Later, he wrote:

It is no accident of history that the first Earth Day, in April 1970, came so soon after color photographs of the whole earth from space were made by homesick astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in December 1968. Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside… Humanity’s habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to.

Since then, Stewart has been a writer, a speaker, an organizer, a pioneer of online communities as a founder of the WELL (the “Whole Eart ‘Lectronic Link,” where I first discovered the power of the Internet), a consultant to companies and the owner of a tugboat in San Francisco where he lives with his wife, Ryan Phelan. He writes: [click to continue…]

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Let’s talk (carefully) about climate and population

November 17, 2009

Have you heard that we’re getting new neighbors? Demographers expect that the number of people living on earth—now about 6.8 billion—will grow to between 8 and 11 billion by 2050.

Whether population tops out at the high or the low end of those projections will have a huge impact on climate change. So population control is again claiming a place on the environmental agenda.

Nairobi slums

Nairobi slums

Oops! Did I say “population control”? I should have said “addressing population growth” or “assuring reproductive rights for women” or even “securing population justice” — because some people get very nervous when environmentalists start talking about population, and for good reason.

Yet the conversation is worth having, which is why I went to a discussion today at the Center for American Progress in Washington featuring Laurie Mazur, the editor of a new book called A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice & The Environmental Challenge (Island Press, $30).

Mazur argues that we are at a pivotal moment, not just environmentally, because of the lethal overheating of the planet, but demographically, because, as she writes,

the ultimate size of the human population will be decided in the next decade or so.

That’s because right now the largest generation of young people in human history is coming of age. Nearly half the world’s population—some 3 billion people—is under the age of twenty-five. Those young people will, quite literally, shape the future. [click to continue…]

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What’s for lunch? Behaviorial economics meets climate change

November 16, 2009

vegetarian-foodAt the Net Impact conference last week, a waiter stopped by before lunch to ask if anyone at our table wanted a vegetarian meal instead of chicken. Just one or two people did.

This, as it happens, is typical. When a meat-based entrée is being served, and people are offered a vegetarian alternative, about 5 to 10% will request it.

But what if the choices were reversed? Organizers of the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference, which began today in Washington, tried an experiment: They made a vegetarian lunch the default option, and gave meat eaters the choice of opting out.

Some 80% went for the veggies, not because there were lots of vegetarians in the crowd of about 700 people but because the choice was framed differently. We know that because, at a prior BECC conference, when meat was the default option, attendees chose the meat by an 83% to 17% margin.

More than lunch is at stake here. “Omnivores contribute seven times the greenhouse gas emissions, when compared to vegans,” says Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, the conference chair, who works for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

Might there be broad-based ways to promote a vegetarian diet, while giving people the freedom to choose what they want? How can smart-grid technology be designed to encourage people to conserve energy? Which “green” marketing messages work, and which don’t? Can the insights of behavioral economics help fight climate change?

Those are the questions that engaged the policy makers, academics, and business executives at this BECC event, which differs from most conversations about climate change. [click to continue…]

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