I wrote this book for the people who run the world’s finest hotels and kitchens, and for the people who will run them next. The second group is sitting in your classrooms. Across eighty interviews, one pattern held without exception: nobody in the book taught themselves. Every general manager and every chef was formed by someone a few rungs up who decided to spend attention on them, and most are now forming others. A course is where that formation can start before the first shift.
The book is built to be taught. Each chapter makes one argument, names the practitioners behind it, and leaves the reader with something to apply: a hiring rule, a checklist, a ladder, a matrix. The free instructor kit on this page carries a teaching guide for all fourteen chapters, a course map and a sample module, and the Field Guide gives students an exercise to run on a real floor each week. If you adopt the book, I would like to hear how it goes.
Where the book fits
| Course | Chapters that fit | How to use them |
|---|---|---|
| Hospitality leadership | Introduction; Chapters 1 to 5; Chapter 13 | Part I as the spine of the course, from the calling to giving the keys; Chapter 13 as the closing session on what a career in the work costs and returns. |
| Hotel or lodging management | Chapters 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12 | Operations through the leader’s eyes: the floor walk and the final inspector, induction, the guest profile and the Anticipation Ladder, the recovery sequence, the technology matrix. |
| Service management and service culture | Chapters 4, 5, 8, 9, 10 | Culture as repeated choices; the four kinds of authority; specific noticing; anticipation and recovery as the two halves of service design. |
| Food and beverage or restaurant management | Chapters 2, 6, 7, 10, 11 | The apprenticeship and the brigade; the creative pipeline; consistency at scale and the pass; the kitchen’s recovery; identity rooted in place. |
| Organizational behavior and human resources | Chapters 2, 4, 5, 13 | Formation under a mentor; hiring for character, induction and the dignified departure; empowerment as a transfer of authority; careers, succession and the wage conversation. |
| Executive education and corporate training | Chapters 3, 4, 5, 10, with the Field Guide | One chapter per session, the matching Field Guide exercise run on the floor between sessions, and the book’s checklists as the tools participants take home. |
Sample discussion questions
- Chapter 1 argues that hotel schools and stagiaire years succeed by selection rather than persuasion. What does that imply about how a school or a first employer should design a student’s early exposure to the work?
- Chapter 3: Philip Barnes says the leader who walks by a problem is the problem. Explain the mechanism: what does the team conclude, and about what?
- Chapter 7: Luc Delafosse walks the floor daily, eats in the employee restaurant and spends two hours in the lobby each evening. Build a general manager’s day that protects that inspection time against the pull of the office, and name what gets cut to make room.
- Chapter 9: Nicholas Yarnell’s server wrote a card in Portuguese for a guest with a peanut allergy, at no cost. Identify an unexpressed need that begins beyond the walls of a property you know, and design a gesture of comparable cost.
- Chapter 12: a vendor offers a system that drafts personalized welcome notes in the general manager’s name in thirty languages. Run the chapter’s three questions (what does it replace, what evidence exists, what happens when it fails) and give a verdict.
- Chapter 13 calls the wage conversation the long game conversation. Make the business case to an owner for raising entry wages above the local floor, using the apprenticeship arc and retention.
The Field Guide in the classroom
The Field Guide is the student side of the book. Its fourteen free lessons condense each chapter in about ten minutes of reading, ask reflection questions, run a short quiz with feedback, and end with a one week exercise students carry onto a floor, into a kitchen or through a group project: a fit log, a walked past card, a recovery log, a sorted technology inventory. The printable workbook gathers every question and exercise in one place and can be handed out on the first day. The teaching guide’s assignments build on these exercises, so the lesson and the chapter can be assigned together and the exercise graded.
The instructor kit.
A teaching guide for all fourteen chapters (summaries, key terms, discussion questions, case prompts and assignments), a course map, and a four week syllabus module. Free for faculty and training leads. Tell us where you teach and the download links appear on the next page.
Request a desk copy.
Faculty considering the book for a course can request a complimentary paperback. Tell us about the course and where to send it. Requests are reviewed personally and copies ship through Amazon in the countries it serves; where print delivery is not possible, a digital review copy is offered instead.
Bulk and corporate orders for hotel groups, restaurant groups and schools: press@theluxuryofattention.com.