Success is Never Final - Book Review

This is a MUST READ

Why? For several reasons:

It's the story of a brand we all know, have experienced and enjoyed. The book explains how this fantastic business was built.

The PRINCIPLES inside - it's incredible how Church, God and Business all worked together to perfection in the Life and Success of the Marriott family.

Snippets such as:

Overarching that was the most fiery flame of all—the hot temper of his Depression-era father, whose fear of debt led him to oppose many of the daring business decisions Bill had to make to build the Marriott empire.

It was a lesson he had learned from his father, that a life of ease is an enemy to progress, both for the person and for the corporation—that, as Bill often put it: “Success is never final.”

Early in the journey, she reported, “My shoes wore out, and I had nothing but rags to wrap my feet in. It was a walk of 1,500 miles.”

“The only time I am really happy is while I am preaching,” he wrote.

“Why don’t you buy my food for your passengers and charge more for their tickets?” Rickenbacker liked the idea and signed up with Hot Shoppes, making J.W. the pioneer of independent in-flight catering.

Less than 10 per cent of Boy Scouts ever achieve Eagle Scout rank, and the average age of those who do succeed is seventeen. Always a hard charger, Billy was awarded the honour only a few months after his fifteenth birthday.

But the big mistake I made was not asking our customers what they wanted. So I cut items I shouldn’t have cut and left selections on the menu I should have taken off. I made unilateral decisions with no customer input—and I made some bad mistakes.”

“Well, you don’t know anything about the hotel business,” his father responded. “Neither does anyone else around here,” Bill countered.

“Okay,” his father said, “go ahead.” And that was that. Bill Marriott was now the proprietor of his first hotel.

His very first “executive decision” involved, of all things, ice buckets. “I was looking over our expenses for Twin Bridges and noticed a pretty hefty sum under the category ‘Other.’ A little investigation revealed that guests found our plastic-covered, cardboard ice buckets so sturdy and convenient that they filled them with ice and drinks to take on the road. At a dollar apiece, the loss of hundreds of buckets in a year would have quickly eaten up our meagre profits, so I ordered permanent ice buckets to be placed in each room, and we were back in business.

“My parents had the philosophy that we only spend money on education and travel,” Debbie said. “We didn’t grow up with fancy cars or a big house.”

For example, large casino hotels lured high rollers with expensive perks such as free suites and even prostitutes and drugs. Bill couldn’t imagine buying into that culture. He was equally wary about the risk to his customers. Gambling could destroy people’s lives with a single roll of the dice. “When you see old men and old women taking their Social Security checks and going to Las Vegas and spending the day and blowing it all and having no money, this is serious business. It’s not good to make your money that way,” he told one interviewer.

For Hart, it was a lesson in how the Marriotts operated. “They will invest that kind of time in a young Turk restaurant manager just to make sure that I will never have a cold bowl of soup that’s ever served in any of my hotels. It’s precisely this attention to every detail that has made Marriott so successful.”

Often asked what it means to be wealthy, Bill cites a Chinese philosopher who once said a rich man can only eat so much.

He concludes: “I believe money should only be a means to an end. If we do good with it, help those in need, provide an opportunity for others to have some of the good things in life, contribute to worthy causes, do things that make others happy, then money is a great blessing. Otherwise, if we are selfish, it becomes a curse and provides no happiness for anyone.”

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