Creating the Four Seasons Difference

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Rather than treating its employees as disposable, Four Seasons distinguished itself, in Sharp's words, "by hiring more for attitude than experience, by establishing career paths and promotion from within, by paying as much attention to employee complaints as guest complaints…by pushing responsibility down and encouraging self-discipline, by setting performance high and holding people accountable, and most of all, adhering to our credo, generating trust."

Sharp's management has generated enough trust to establish Four Seasons as the employer of choice in the hotel industry. When the New York City location opened in 1994, more than 30,000 applicants applied for 400 jobs.

Architecture at Four Seasons

In architecting Four Seasons' competitive strategy, Sharp did not proceed sequentially. Instead of first deciding how big a hotel would be, then establishing service standards, and then setting human resources policy, he kept the chain of considerations in mind while working on individual links in the chain.

One organizing principle runs through the entire Four Seasons organization. Everyone is guided by the Golden Rule: in Sharp's words, "to deal with others—partners, customers, coworkers, everyone—as we would want them to deal with us." Every phase of hotel operations coheres around this strategy. Significantly, Four Seasons has no separate customer service department. Everyone at the Four Seasons is not just a member of the customer service department, but in charge of it.

Resolution at Four Seasons

Sharp set out to create "a reputation for service so clear in people's mind that Four Seasons' name will become an asset of far greater value than bricks and mortar." The results speak for themselves. With 73 hotels in 31 countries, and with 25 properties under development, Four Seasons is considerably larger than the next biggest luxury player. Condé Nast Traveler ranks 18 Four Seasons hotels in its global Top 100 list, more than three times the next most cited chain. A Four Seasons signifies that a city has become a global destination.

Sharp succeeded because he was willing to consider a broader set of salient features, delve into more complicated causal relationships, and architect holistically the decision facing him. His resolution produced a system of reinforcing activities, each of which fits with and strengthens the whole. In the process, he did nothing less than fashion a new way to succeed in the luxury lodging business.

Reprinted from The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by arrangement with Harvard Business School Press. Professor Roger Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He holds the Premier's Chair in Competitiveness & Productivity and serves as director of the AIC Institute for Corporate Citizenship at Rotman.