When I spoke with Aaron Kaupp, he was general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris. The book notes that he has since become Regional Vice President and Managing Director, Raffles (Dubai, Seychelles, Bahrain). He appears in more chapters than almost anyone else I interviewed, and the Introduction pairs him with Ana Roš as the two people who make the book’s central claim concrete.
Kaupp speaks to the whole arc of a career. He started at twenty serving breakfast at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Switzerland, and he told me that the energy of a busy dining room was, his word, priceless. He speaks to leadership as something the team can see: a general manager who picks up an empty coffee cup on the way through the lobby has shown the team what the standard is. He speaks to protection, in the story of a manager who finished his shift for him early in his career, a gesture he says has compounded for nearly forty years. He speaks to hiring for character, to empowerment as the ground of mutual trust, and to what the work can and cannot teach.
“Today, we can teach someone to shake the perfect martini or to read a profit and loss statement, but what we cannot teach is the human touch, and being a people person.” Aaron Kaupp, then general manager, Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris
In the book, Aaron Kaupp appears in the Introduction, where his coffee cup sits beside Ana Roš’s hunt for perfection; in Chapter 1, The Calling, where a breakfast shift becomes a recognition of the work he wanted to stay inside; in Chapter 3, Leading by Example, where the small gesture and the late night gesture are treated as one category; in Chapter 4, First the Team, which opens with the manager who finished his shift and returns to his interview questions about difficult situations; in Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, where his formulation of empowerment is the chapter’s starting point; in Chapter 8, The Human Touch, which carries his sentence on what cannot be taught and his story of a hundred helium balloons for a guest missing her fiancé; and in Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, where his definition of luxury sets the standard the guest profile exists to serve.
“He took care of me, knowing I needed to be at my best for my department to succeed, even if that meant finishing my shift for me. This is the kind of culture and spirit critical to success.” Aaron Kaupp, then general manager, Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris