What the book does
Excellence Wins: A No-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise (Zondervan, 2019), written with Dean Merrill, is Horst Schulze’s account of roughly fifty years in hotels, from a teenage apprenticeship in a German resort to co-founding The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company in 1983 and, after leaving it, founding Capella Hotels and Resorts. The subtitle is accurate. Schulze does not write around a point. He tells the reader what excellence consists of, why most companies settle for less, and what a leader has to do about it.
The argument runs in a straight line. Customers, in every market Schulze has studied, want three things: a product without defects, delivered on time, by people who care about them. Delivering those three things consistently is a decision, and the decision has to be made at the top and carried all the way to the people who clean the rooms. The famous Ritz-Carlton phrase, ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen, came from Schulze’s observation as a young man that staff who saw themselves as people of standing behaved with pride, and it became the foundation of how the company selected, oriented and treated its employees. The book explains the orientation that every new hire went through on their first day, the daily lineup that repeated the standards, and the policy that let any employee spend up to two thousand dollars to resolve a guest’s problem without asking a manager. Schulze presents that last policy as arithmetic. A loyal guest over a lifetime was worth far more than the authority cost, and in practice the authority was used sparingly and to great effect.
The book is for anyone who wants a system rather than a sentiment. Hotel people will read it as the primary source for standards they were trained on, and leaders outside hotels read it as a template for building service into a large organization, which is how Schulze intended it.
What readers tend to want next
Readers who loved Excellence Wins tend to want to hear from the generation that inherited Schulze’s standards. He built the system. Thousands of general managers have run it since, in Ritz-Carltons and in every brand that copied them, and readers want to know how those operators describe the work from the inside today.
A second wish is for the kitchen. Schulze’s standard, a product without defect delivered on time by people who care, describes a three Michelin star kitchen as precisely as it describes a hotel, and readers who have noticed the parallel want someone to draw it out.
A third is the question of the human element that Schulze’s system is designed to protect. The book is clear that process exists to serve the guest’s feeling of being cared for. Readers want to know what the caring itself looks like when the process is working.
What The Luxury of Attention adds
The Luxury of Attention is my own book, and it is in direct conversation with Schulze’s. It draws on eighty first person interviews with 36 general managers of the world’s finest hotels and 44 Michelin-starred chefs, and it takes the position that the two crafts share one discipline, which the title names.
Giving the Keys is the chapter on empowerment, and it cites Schulze’s two thousand dollar policy as the most documented example of spending authority in the industry. The chapter then separates empowerment into four kinds of authority, with Alexander Pichel of Kempinski, Adrian Gray of Lotte Hotel Moscow and Aaron Kaupp of Raffles on what each one requires of the leader. The Recovery is the chapter Schulze’s policy exists to serve. Axel Bethke of Anantara and Pichel set out the sequence for the first ten minutes after a failure. Gerrit Graef, then general manager of The Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh, describes negative feedback as the breakfast of champions, and Anneke Brown of COMO explains why the apology note and the bottle of wine are the worst available response. In Pursuit of Perfection is the kitchen answer to Schulze’s definition of a defect free product. Ana Roš of Hiša Franko describes perfection as a hunt a chef must never complete, Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin took twenty years to get a single dish exactly right, and Joan Roca and José Andrés describe the daily practice that keeps a standard from slipping.
For the human element, Leading by Example follows general managers from The Plaza, The Savoy and Mandarin Oriental through the daily presence on the floor that turns a written standard into a lived one.
A reading order
- Excellence Wins, Horst Schulze with Dean Merrill (2019), for the system.
- Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy, Isadore Sharp (2009), for a second founder’s account of building a luxury hotel culture in the same era.
- The Luxury of Attention, Rahim B. Kanani (2026), for the operators who run such houses now, in hotels and in kitchens.
- Setting the Table, Danny Meyer (2006), for the restaurant founder’s version of putting employees first.