This is Van Quach. She came to this country in from Vietnam. She changed her name to Vivian because she wanted to fit in here in America. Her first job was at an inner-city motel in San Francisco as a maid. I happened to buy that motel about three months after Vivian started working there. So Vivian and I have been working together for 23 years.
With the youthful idealism of a year-old, in , I started my company and I called it Joie de Vivre, a very impractical name, because I actually was looking to create joy of life.
And this first hotel that I bought, motel, was a pay-by-the-hour, no-tell motel in the inner-city of San Francisco. As I spent time with Vivian, I saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work. It made me question and curious: How could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living? What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests.
And what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home. Because what we actually count truly counts. Let me start by telling you a little story. This is Van Quach. She came to this country in from Vietnam.
She changed her name to Vivian because she wanted to fit in here in America. Her first job was at an inner-city motel in San Francisco as a maid. I happened to buy that motel about three months after Vivian started working there. So Vivian and I have been working together for 23 years. With the youthful idealism of a year-old, in , I started my company and I called it Joie de Vivre, a very impractical name, because I actually was looking to create joy of life.
And this first hotel that I bought, motel, was a pay-by-the-hour, no-tell motel in the inner-city of San Francisco. As I spent time with Vivian, I saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work. It made me question and curious: How could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living? So I spent time with Vivian, and I saw that she didn't find joy in cleaning toilets. Her job, her goal and her calling was not to become the world's greatest toilet scrubber.
What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests. And what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home. Because Vivian knew what it was like to be far away from home.
That very human lesson, more than 20 years ago, served me well during the last economic downturn we had. We were the largest operator of hotels in the Bay Area, so we were particularly vulnerable. But also back then, remember we stopped eating French fries in this country. Well, not exactly, of course not. We started eating "freedom fries," and we started boycotting anything that was French. Well, my name of my company, Joie de Vivre -- so I started getting these letters from places like Alabama and Orange County saying to me that they were going to boycott my company because they thought we were a French company.
And I'd write them back, and I'd say, "What a minute. We're not French. We're an American company. We're based in San Francisco. So one particular day when I was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre, I ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices. And I initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution. But given my befuddled state of mind, I ended up in the self-help section very quickly.
That's where I got reacquainted with Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs. But as I sat there for four hours, the full afternoon, reading Maslow, I recognized something that is true of most leaders. One of the simplest facts in business is something that we often neglect, and that is that we're all human. Each of us, no matter what our role is in business, has some hierarchy of needs in the workplace. So as I started reading more Maslow, what I started to realize is that Maslow, later in his life, wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to the collective, to organizations and specifically to business.
But unfortunately, he died prematurely in , and so he wasn't really able to live that dream completely. So I realized in that dotcom crash that my role in life was to channel Abe Maslow. And that's what I did a few years ago when I took that five-level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what I call the transformation pyramid, which is survival, success and transformation.
It's not just fundamental in business, it's fundamental in life. And we started asking ourselves the questions about how we were actually addressing the higher needs, these transformational needs for our key employees in the company. These three levels of the hierarchy needs relate to the five levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
But as we started asking ourselves about how we were addressing the higher needs of our employees and our customers, I realized we had no metrics. We had nothing that actually could tell us whether we were actually getting it right. So we started asking ourselves: What kind of less obvious metrics could we use to actually evaluate our employees' sense of meaning, or our customers' sense of emotional connection with us?
For example, we actually started asking our employees, do they understand the mission of our company, and do they feel like they believe in it, can they actually influence it, and do they feel that their work actually has an impact on it? We started asking our customers, did they feel an emotional connection with us, in one of seven different kinds of ways.
Miraculously, as we asked these questions and started giving attention higher up the pyramid, what we found is we created more loyalty. Our customer loyalty skyrocketed.
Our employee turnover dropped to one-third of the industry average,and during that five year dotcom bust, we tripled in size. What we can measure is that tangible stuff at the bottom of the pyramid. They didn't even see the intangible stuff higher up the pyramid. So I started asking myself the question: How can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible?
If we're taught as leaders to just manage what we can measure,and all we can measure is the tangible in life, we're missing a whole lot of things at the top of the pyramid. So I went out and studied a bunch of things, and I found a survey that showed that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business, things like intellectual property, their corporate culture, their brand loyalty, and yet, only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business.
So as leaders, we understand that intangibles are important, but we don't have a clue how to measure them. So here's another Einstein quote: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
It was that sort of heady question about what counts that led me to take my CEO hat off for a week and fly off to the Himalayan peaks. I flew off to a place that's been shrouded in mystery for centuries, a place some folks call Shangri-La.
It's actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world. I went to Bhutan. The teenage king of Bhutan was also a curious man, but this was back in , when he ascended to the throne two days after his father passed away.
At age 17, he started asking the kinds of questions that you'd expect of someone with a beginner's mind. The king responded in a fashion that actually has transformed us four decades later. He said the following, he said: "Why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product? Why don't we care more about gross national happiness?
Most world leaders didn't take notice, and those that did thought this was just "Buddhist economics. This was a notable moment,because this was the first time a world leader in almost years had suggested that intangible of happiness -- that leader years ago, Thomas Jefferson with the Declaration of Independence -- years later, this king was suggesting that intangible of happiness is something that we should measure,and it's something we should actually value as government officials.
For the next three dozen years as king, this king actually started measuring and managing around happiness in Bhutan -- including, just recently, taking his country from being an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy with no bloodshed, no coup.
Bhutan, for those of you who don't know it, is the newest democracy in the world, just two years ago. And I got to spend some time with the prime minister.
Over dinner, I asked him an impertinent question. I asked him, "How can you create and measure something which evaporates -- in other words, happiness? We create the conditions for happiness to occur. In other words, we create a habitat of happiness. He said that they have a science behind that art, and they've actually created four essential pillars, nine key indicators and 72 different metrics that help them to measure their GNH.
One of those key indicators is: How do the Bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day? It's a good question. How do you feel about how you spend your time each day? Time is one of the scarcest resources in the modern world. And yet, of course, that little intangible piece of data doesn't factor into our GDP calculations. As I spent my week up in the Himalayas, I started to imagine what I call an emotional equation. And it focuses on something I read long ago from a guy named Rabbi Hyman Schachtel.
How many know him? Or in other words, I think the Bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have -- imagine gratitude --divided by having what you want -- gratification. The Bhutanese aren't on some aspirational treadmill,constantly focused on what they don't have.
Their religion, their isolation, their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their GNH movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have.
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