Do Business Well

The Logic of the Game

To the hotel Manager, the Boss’s game was a good one, so he learned how to play it. It was a simple game, but effective. It was built on the following logic:

Most people today are not getting what they want. Not from their jobs, not from their families, not from their religion, not from their government, and, most important, not from themselves.

Something is missing in most of our lives.

Part of what’s missing is purpose. Values. Worthwhile standards against which our lives can be measured. Part of what’s missing is a Game Worth Playing. What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another.

In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves?

As a result, most of us scramble about hungrily seeking distraction, in music, in television, in people, in drugs.

And most of all we seek things.

Things to wear and things to do.

Things to fill the emptiness.

Things to shore up our eroding sense of self.

Things to which we can attach meaning, significance, life.

We’ve fast become a world of things. And most people are being buried in the profusion.

What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning.

A place in which being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential.

A place where the generally disorganized thinking that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result.

A place where discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise and action, of being what you are intentionally instead of accidentally.

A place that replaces the home most of us have lost.

That’s what a business can do_; it can create a Game Worth Playing.

It can become that place of community.

It can become that place where words such as integrity, intention, commitment, vision, and excellence can be used as action steps in the process of producing a worthwhile result.

What kind of result?

Giving your customer a sense that your business is a special place, created by special people, doing what they do in the best possible way.

And all being done for the simplest, most human reason possible—because they’re alive!

What other reason do you need?

Human beings are capable of performing extraordinary acts. Capable of going to the moon. Capable of creating the computer. Capable of building a bomb that can destroy us all.

The least we should be able to do is run a small business that works.

For if we can’t do that, then what’s the value of our grand ideas?

What purpose do they serve but to alienate us from ourselves, from each other, from who we are?

Playing the Game

Thinking the way the hotel owner did, you can begin to construct a mental map of the game he created. His hotel became a world in which the sensory experiences of his customer were greeted by a profound dedication to cleanliness, beauty, and order.

But this dedication didn’t rest on a purely commercial justification (though there was that too_; no business could be successful without it) but a moral one. On the Boss’s philosophy, his view of the world, his idea.

The idea was then communicated to his people, both in word and deed, through a well-planned process.

The importance of this cannot be overstated.

The Boss communicated his idea through documented systems and through his warm, moving, and positive manner.

He knew that he could communicate the orderly yet human process of pleasing customers to his people only if it were communicated to them in an orderly and human way.

In short, the medium of communication became as important as the idea it was designed to communicate.

And the hotel’s hiring process became the first and most essential medium for communicating the Boss’s idea.

As the Manager explained it to me, the hiring process was comprised of several distinct components:

1. A scripted presentation communicating the Boss’s idea in a group meeting to all of the applicants at the same time. This presentation described not only the idea but also the business’s history and experience in successfully implementing that idea, and the attributes required of the successful candidate for the position in question.
2. Meeting with each applicant individually to discuss his reactions to and feelings about the idea, as well as his background and experience. At this meeting, each applicant was also asked why he felt he was superbly appropriate for the role the position was to play in implementing the Boss’s idea.
3. Notification of the successful candidate by telephone. Again, a scripted presentation.
4. Notification of the unsuccessful applicants, thanking each for his interest. A standard letter, signed by the interviewer.
5. First day of training to include the following activities for both the Boss and the new employee:

• Reviewing the Boss’s idea
• Summarizing the system through which the entire business brings the idea to reality
• Taking the new employee on a tour of the facilities, highlighting people at work and systems at work to demonstrate the interdependence of the systems on people and the people on systems
• Answering clearly and fully all the employee’s questions
• Issuing the employee his uniform and his Operations Manual
• Reviewing the Operations Manual, including the Strategic Objective, the Organizational Strategy, and the Position Contract of the employee’s position
• Completing the employment papers

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