What the book does
The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company (McGraw-Hill, 2008) is Joseph Michelli’s study of how one hotel company turned a service reputation into a repeatable method. Michelli, a psychologist and consultant who had written about Starbucks two years earlier, was given access to the company’s executives, its hotels and its Leadership Center, the training arm that teaches the Ritz-Carlton approach to outside companies. The result is an outsider’s account, which gives it a different value from the memoirs on this list. He checks what the leadership says against what the staff do.
The book is organized around five principles. Define and Refine covers the Gold Standards, the set of statements every employee carries on a card: the Credo, the Motto, the Three Steps of Service and the Service Values. Michelli’s point is that the words are only the start. What keeps them alive is the daily lineup, a short meeting at the start of every shift in every hotel where one standard is discussed and a story of service is shared. Empower through Trust covers selection, orientation and the authority given to every employee to spend up to two thousand dollars to resolve a guest’s problem. It’s Not about You turns to the guest, and to how the company gathers and uses what it knows about each one. Deliver Wow! is about the emotional connection the systems exist to produce, and the stories the company collects to show what it looks like. Leave a Lasting Footprint covers community work and the decision to teach the method to others.
Each chapter closes with a short list of practical takeaways, and the book is written for leaders well beyond hotels, which is how it has been used.
What readers tend to want next
Readers who loved The New Gold Standard tend to want the view from inside the building. Michelli gives the method clearly, and the general managers who ran those hotels appear mostly as examples. A reader wants to hear them at length, in their own words, on what the standard asks of them on an ordinary night.
A second wish is to see whether the method is particular to one company. Readers want to know how general managers at Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, Kempinski and Raffles describe the same problems, and where their answers differ.
A third is the kitchen. A three Michelin star restaurant has a defined standard, a daily briefing, a system for knowing the guest and a way of recovering when a plate goes wrong. Readers who have noticed the parallel want the chefs and the hoteliers in the same room.
What The Luxury of Attention adds
The Luxury of Attention is my own book. It draws on eighty first person interviews with 36 general managers of the world’s finest hotels and 44 Michelin-starred chefs, and it argues that the two crafts share one discipline, the attention the title names. Two of the hoteliers were running Ritz-Carlton properties when we spoke, Gerrit Graef in Riyadh and Mahmoud Skaf in Kuala Lumpur, and the book cites Horst Schulze, the company’s co-founder, where his thinking bears on the argument.
Giving the Keys is the chapter that corresponds to Michelli’s second principle. It treats the two thousand dollar policy as the best documented example of spending authority in the industry, then takes empowerment apart, with Skaf on empowerment as a business decision, Alexander Pichel of Kempinski and Adrian Gray of Lotte Hotel Moscow on what each kind of authority requires of the leader, and Kai Speth of The Reverie Saigon on asking the team how they would solve the problem before offering an answer. Knowing Your Guest is the chapter for Michelli’s third principle. Krister Svensson, then of The St. Regis Bangkok, describes how guest preferences travel across thousands of hotels in a single company. Taljinder Singh of The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, knew 250 regular guests by heart, and Axel Bethke of Anantara explains why the best information about a guest still comes from conversation. The Recovery follows Michelli’s wow stories to the moment before them, when something has gone wrong. Graef describes negative feedback as the breakfast of champions, and Anneke Brown of COMO explains why a note and a bottle of wine is the weakest available response.
For the chefs’ version of a defined standard held daily, In Pursuit of Perfection has Ana Roš of Hiša Franko and Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin on a standard that is chased and never reached. The sayings these leaders gave me on trust and example are collected on the leading a team page, and the people who hire the way Ritz-Carlton selects are gathered in the hiring for character collection.
A reading order
- The New Gold Standard, Joseph Michelli (2008), for the method as an outside observer saw it.
- Excellence Wins, Horst Schulze with Dean Merrill (2019), for the co-founder’s own account of where the method came from.
- The Luxury of Attention, Rahim B. Kanani (2026), for the general managers and chefs who hold such standards today, in hotels and in kitchens.
- Be Our Guest, Disney Institute with Theodore Kinni (2001, revised 2011), for a second service system that has been taught far beyond its own industry.