Isadore Sharp

What was my grand dream? Well I can say with a great deal of certainty and truth that there was no vision, there was no grand dream. The fact is I was just trying to do one small hotel deal. One deal – not a company.

Isadore Sharp

Our competitors interpreted luxury chiefly as dazzling architecture and décor, but how important is that to our customers? They are mostly executives, often under pressure, fighting jet lag, stress and the clock. We decided to redefine luxury as service.

Isadore Sharp

Long-term success is never achieved on our own. The phrase “a self-made man” is a myth – all along the way we need support.

Isadore Sharp

Every road will have a detour and bumps. The choices are the forks in the road. Usually when you understand something and feel good it gives you the will to persevere, overcome the skepticism and see through the negative side that people present

Isadore Sharp

Whatever you do, don’t ever use a crutch, and don’t ever think of having an excuse for not having said, “Yeah, I did my best.”

Isadore Sharp

I started just from building one (hotel), it worked so let’s build another, and it worked so three went to four. It’s a matter of what I call stepping-stones.

Isadore Sharp

If someone had told me “Look, you’re going to start today and spend the next five years wasting your time trying to get this thing start”, I would have said I can’t do that. But you never think about what it’s going to take of you. Think: I’ve got it now.

Isadore Sharp

The essential question for us in the early days was: “What did guests value most?” Market research said luxury, not necessarily elegant surroundings and gourmet meals. The greatest luxury is time, and service can help you make the most of that. Give greater productivity, greater enjoyment – what better luxury can there be?

Isadore Sharp

The primary job of leadership, and that is to create a governing purpose that unites

Isadore Sharp

We aimed to treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves. Enforcing our credo was the hardest part, and senior managers who couldn’t or wouldn’t live by it were weeded out within a few years.

Isadore Sharp

My life in high school revolved around sports. Partying became my priority.

Isadore Sharp

Eddie and Murray had always told me that if I ever had a real estate venture, they would like to invest in it.

Isadore Sharp

A hotel seemed to me to be a more interesting structure to build because it would be a more active kind of building than either a factory or a house.

Isadore Sharp

My wife and I stayed at the Dorchester in London. It was a wonderful hotel and it started me thinking that there is a real style in hotels that must be appreciated, since hotels like the Dorchester have gone on for so long.

Isadore Sharp

Guests get a fail-safe experience so that a company is eager to pay the extra $50 to ensure a hassle-free trip for an executive who might be working on a $50 million deal.

Isadore Sharp

To be at the top we get service standards down to the bottom of the pyramid, and that process begins for us with our hiring policy. We hire for attitude. We want people who like other people and are, therefore, more motivated to serve them. Competence we can teach. Attitude is ingrained.

Isadore Sharp

Businesses are all relationships, based on common values, values such as staying true to your word. Every religion also enshrines those values, so you can have different religious beliefs, but underlying those beliefs, you’ve got people who must have similar values, and can work together.

Isadore Sharp

We tend to believe all strategy emanates from executive offices. But when our frontline people are interacting with our customers they are formulating service strategy every minute of every day, and they do it so well.

Isadore Sharp

Polls taken recently for Fortune’s annual listing of the 100 Best Companies To Work For in America – which I’m happy to say has always included us – find that employees in these firms value, primarily, three things. First, to work for leaders who demand and inspire their best. Second, a physical environment that makes work enjoyable. And third, a sense of purpose, and a feeling they’re working for more than a pay cheque.

Isadore Sharp

In every area, we push down responsibility, from head office to our frontline people, who have authority to make most decisions they feel are needed to satisfy our guests. That’s why, early on, we set a mandate of zero mistakes. Inevitably, of course, mistakes occur. But when our employees are trusted to use their common sense, they can, and do turn mishaps into new service opportunities. Then, what the customer remembers is not the complaint but the outcome.

Isadore Sharp

This requires managers who are less bosses than mentors and communicators. For employees to act on their own initiative, they have to know our priorities. We pay as much attention to employee complaints as to guest complaints. We upgrade employee facilities whenever we upgrade a hotel, we have no class distinction in cafeterias and parking lots. We establish career paths and promotion from within – as one employee quoted by Fortune said “Great pay, great perks, great food. I’m treated like a five diamond hotel guest.” Our gold rule is treat everyone – customers, employees, partners, suppliers – as we ourselves would want to be treated.

Isadore Sharp

The fastest way for management to destroy credibility is to say employees come first and to be seen putting them last. If management shows greater concern for power, prestige, and costs than for customers and company values we forfeit belief and trust, along with our goal of being the best. Trust is the unseen and too often neglected determinant of corporate success. Trust is the emotional capital of leadership, the essence of the brand name, and a synonym for customer loyalty. Every year that service culture grows stronger, with a camaraderie that deepens to create a sense of community that makes cooperation the norm.

Isadore Sharp

My task is to sell the vision, preaching the gospel of service every day and in every hotel. I continuously restate and develop it. I focus employees at every level on one priority: giving customers added value through service. Motivated by an inner need to do well by others, our people delight and surprise our guests every day. The sum of their efforts is what makes Four Seasons unique. By nurturing the full potential of every willing worker from top to bottom, I believe that businesses can tap a unique source of leadership and success for the 21st Century.

Isadore Sharp

We treat our employees with the same level of respect that they in turn give our guests. This, combined with managing rather than owning hotels, has long been the foundation of the company’s philosophy, and the driving force behind its success.

Isadore Sharp

With China, India, Russia and other developing countries growing in market importance, recognition and appreciation of a brand name will not only help gain market share but also open up many, many opportunities for development.

Isadore Sharp

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That set in place the culture of the company, which gave us service, which allowed us to become the best.

Isadore Sharp

The power of a global brand name is more important and valuable today than ever before.

Isadore Sharp

Our first responsibility, of course, is to be profitable, which means, in a global economy: be competitive. But this no longer depends primarily on wealth creation through physical assets, it calls for wealth creation through human resources: the continuous input of information, ideas and enterprise from our employees. A high-performance company today is one with close cooperation from those who deliver service or make the product, those best able to spot and fix any problems as they arise.

Isadore Sharp

I’m sure we’ve all read reports on the productivity gains achieved by empowering employees. And we all know the workplace has to change to attain this. And in a survey of 264 big-company chairmen, 62 percent agreed that “one of the most important business issues facing them” was “building and keeping a qualified workforce.”

Isadore Sharp

We do that, first of all, by establishing a meaningful goal. An overriding purpose that most people can relate to. If the goal is clear and the focus is sharp and constantly reinforced, we unify and energize through a sense of common purpose. Now our traditional purpose of maximizing profits for our shareholders is not one that inspires employees to ardent effort. Profit directs our focus toward short-term market gains. But, it can sometimes short-circuit, and often distract us from our real purpose, which is customer satisfaction. And as long as we can keep on creating customer value, profit is unlikely to be a concern.

Isadore Sharp

And we also know that what we must do to meet that goal, is to lower costs and raise service and product quality. But cutting costs by cutting labour, if carried too
far, lowers quality. The only way these seemingly conflicting aims can be reconciled is by responsible employees committed to working smarter. Instead of minimizing labour’s cost we should maximize labour’s value: by convincing our employees that our purpose merits commitment.

Isadore Sharp

We can’t command employee commitment today—if indeed we ever could. Leadership requires that we persuade. If we want a world class workforce, we have to be world class communicators.

Isadore Sharp

The precondition for effective communication is credibility, and we’re often communicating across a credibility gap that grows as employment shrinks. We think of communication as words, spoken or written. But we’re now in a bear market for words. We can no longer communicate persuasively through rhetoric, it doesn’t work. And we can no longer depend on the authority of a title—leadership is no longer conferred by position.

Isadore Sharp

The kind of leadership now required has been put in a nutshell by the late Edward R. Murrow, one of the world’s most credible broadcasters. He said, “To be
persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable we must be credible. And to be credible we must be truthful.”

Isadore Sharp

We now have to earn our credibility. Through action and through example. The only effective communication—the only reality—is performance. Leaders have to set a pattern of behaviour for others to follow.

Isadore Sharp

We earn credibility only when employees see that what we say is confirmed by what we do, and when our actions consistently further our stated goal. We have to
share information truthfully, openly and fully. And we have to earn trust before a sense of common purpose can emerge.

Isadore Sharp

The degree of trust in integrity, openness and empathy is the measure of a leader’s legitimacy. Companies, like civilization, run on trust. We trust that our food is safe, that banks won’t fail or elevators fall. Trust is embodied in every action, in every relationship. Trust is the emotional capital of leadership. When it’s squandered, unity fractures, cooperation declines, and the sense of common purpose is lost.

Isadore Sharp

I believe trust to be the essence of the ability to unify, to direct and to motivate, the three cardinal qualities of leadership. There are others: mental toughness, judgement, conviction, patience, enthusiasm—you could all add to this list—each quality taking precedence from the task to be done.

Isadore Sharp

In our situation, I think the crucial task of leadership is to bring out the best in our people. And my greatest pleasure in receiving this award, is realizing how many people have developed along with the company, people at every level who have matured on the job. And if I have done my job right, they won’t be saying, “He did it,” they’ll be saying, “We did it.”

Isadore Sharp

And we also know that what we must do to meet that goal, is to lower costs and raise service and product quality. But cutting costs by cutting labour, if carried too
far, lowers quality. The only way these seemingly conflicting aims can be reconciled is by responsible employees committed to working smarter. Instead of minimizing labour’s cost we should maximize labour’s value: by convincing our employees that our purpose merits commitment.

Isadore Sharp