When I spoke with Adrian Gray, he was general manager of Lotte Hotel Moscow. He is one of the hoteliers in the book who describes empowerment in operational terms rather than as a slogan, and one of the few whose own early career reads as a course in recovery.
Gray speaks first to decision authority, which the book treats as the first of the things a leader actually hands over when they give the team the keys. The front desk agent who can move a complaining guest to another room without paging a manager. The line cook who can pull a plate that does not meet the standard. Gray’s version is practical. Communicate the objectives clearly, then let the team make the decisions that achieve them, especially where guests are concerned. The leader’s job after that is to support those decisions and to allow improvisation, because ownership and pride follow from authority and do not precede it.
“Once you clearly communicate your organization’s objectives, empower your team to make decisions to achieve those results: particularly with respect to guests. As a leader, you need to support their ability to make decisions, and allow them to improvise.” Adrian Gray, then general manager, Lotte Hotel Moscow
He also speaks to what crisis teaches. A few months into his first front office job the hotel was sold and the senior team resigned, and he was, in his phrase, immediately catapulted through the crisis into a position of responsibility. On his first day as assistant night manager the computer systems crashed and a kitchen flood caved in the ceiling of the restaurant below. He did not describe any of this to me as misfortune. He described it as the training that made him the operator he became.
“All of this taught me to be tenacious, to expect the unexpected, and manage crises calmly and professionally” Adrian Gray, then general manager, Lotte Hotel Moscow
In the book, Adrian Gray appears in Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, where his sentence on communicating objectives and supporting decisions anchors the section on decision authority, and in Chapter 10, The Recovery, where his early career sits beside Stephen Ansell’s account of a revolution in Bishkek as evidence that recovery is rehearsed in peacetime, long before the crisis arrives.