When I spoke with Kai Speth, he was general manager of The Reverie Saigon in Vietnam, after thirty six years in the industry across nine countries. The book notes that he has since become Chief Operating Officer of The Bartolotta Restaurants in Milwaukee.
What Speth speaks to in the book is the specific verbal move that turns training into empowerment. A general manager will often be expected to resolve an issue a team member has raised. The real solution, he told me, is to push the challenge back: how would you solve it? The team should be empowered to identify challenges and to propose solutions, and an issue resolved that way, rather than from the top down, has a much higher chance of success. It is a small move with a large cumulative effect. The team member whose first question is met with that redirect will, by the third question, arrive with a proposed solution already attached, and will eventually reserve the leader’s time for the questions that genuinely need it.
“One of the most important ways to engage and empower your colleagues is to let them problem-solve” Kai Speth, then general manager, The Reverie Saigon
He also gave me a warning I think belongs on the wall of every owner’s meeting in the coming decade. A true luxury offering cannot be achieved where cost cutting is the norm. Success comes from investing in people, in new product offerings and in new service ideas, and a shrinking budget cannot always be used as an excuse to stop improving. He urges leaders to push to experiment, because it is the only way to stay relevant in a very competitive industry. The budget that matters most, in the book’s accounting, is still the one spent on people.
In the book, Kai Speth appears in Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, where his redirect shows how a leader hands real authority to the team one question at a time, and in Chapter 14, The Future of Luxury and Craft, where his warning about cost cutting frames the chapter’s argument that the investment in people remains the one that counts.
“A true luxury offering cannot be achieved if cost cutting is the norm. Success can only come from investing in people, new product offerings and new service ideas.” Kai Speth, then general manager, The Reverie Saigon