When I spoke with Taljinder Singh, he was general manager of The Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. The book notes that he has since become Senior Vice President and Brand Custodian at IHCL in Mumbai.
Singh speaks in the book to what a mentor gives and to what a senior person is expected to know. He began his career as an assistant lobby manager at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi, where Patu Keswani, then resident manager, pushed him constantly to take on more than his duties required, and the two of them wrote the first presentation on revenue management within The Taj Group. He watched Keswani walk the lobby and greet returning guests by name, remembering which suite they had taken and asking after a daughter who had been ill, and he understood that he was now obliged to be capable of the same. He named a second mentor, Ronnie Lobo, the general manager at the time, whose treatment of people with respect, fairness and dignity he carried into his own leadership in Mumbai. And he told me that, with no technology to track the guest experience, he was expected to know the history of the hotel’s top 250 guests from memory.
“I was expected to know the history of the top 250 guests of the hotel, verbatim.” Taljinder Singh, then General Manager, The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai
In the book, Taljinder Singh appears in Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, Chapter 3, Leading by Example, Chapter 4, First the Team, and Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest. In The Apprenticeship, Keswani’s attention is the example of what a mentor actually spends on a protégé. In Leading by Example, Keswani’s lobby is where Singh absorbed the standard as a behavior rather than a policy. In First the Team, Lobo’s respect, fairness and dignity is one more iteration of a lesson that is learned by watching. In Knowing Your Guest, the 250 guests held in a single memory is the canonical version of the discipline before the database era, and the point I draw from it is that the databases have redistributed the work rather than made it easier.
“One of the most important qualities I gleaned from his leadership and management style is how he treated people with the utmost respect, fairness, and dignity.” Taljinder Singh, then General Manager, The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai