The New Gold Standard

**Author:** Joseph A. Michelli

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- How the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company built one of the most admired service cultures in the world - Why the Gold Standards framework creates alignment across thousands of employees in dozens of countries - How empowerment, careful hiring, and continuous learning combine to produce legendary customer experiences - What it takes to anticipate guest needs before they are spoken - How to apply these principles to any organization, regardless of industry

**Who This Book Is For:**

This book is for leaders who want to build organizations that deliver exceptional customer experiences. It is for managers who struggle to translate lofty values into daily behaviors. It is for entrepreneurs who want to create a service culture from the ground up. And it is for anyone who has ever wondered how a luxury hotel chain manages to consistently delight guests across cultures, languages, and continents.

Every industry has its legends. In technology, it is Apple. In retail, it is Amazon. In hospitality, the name that consistently rises above all others is Ritz-Carlton. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award twice, a feat no other hotel company has achieved even once. It consistently ranks at the top of customer satisfaction surveys. Its employees, known as Ladies and Gentlemen, stay with the company far longer than industry averages. And its guests tell stories that sound almost unbelievable: a lost stuffed animal returned with a photo album of its extended vacation, a favorite wine remembered from a stay three years earlier, a medical emergency handled with grace and discretion. How does this happen? How does a company with properties in dozens of countries, employing tens of thousands of people from vastly different cultures, consistently deliver this level of service? The answer is not magic. It is not luck. It is not even primarily about luxury amenities or beautiful buildings, though those certainly help. The answer lies in a carefully constructed system of values, practices, and disciplined execution that the company calls its Gold Standards. When Joseph Michelli set out to understand the Ritz-Carlton phenomenon, he was given unprecedented access to the company's leaders, employees, training programs, and internal processes. What he discovered was both surprisingly simple and extraordinarily difficult to replicate. The simple part is the framework. The Ritz-Carlton Gold Standards consist of a Credo, a Motto, Three Steps of Service, and Twelve Service Values. These documents fit on a small card that every employee carries at all times. They are not complicated. They are not abstract. They are direct statements about how the company intends to treat its guests and its employees. The difficult part is the…