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Федеральное агентство по образованию

Государственное образовательное учреждение

высшего профессионального образования

НИЖЕГОРОДСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ

ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКИЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

ИМ. Н.А.ДОБРОЛЮБОВА

Marriott:ФОРМУЛА УСПЕХА

Читаем и обсуждаем по-английски

Учебное пособие

Нижний Новгород 2010

Печатается по решению редакционно-издательского совета ГОУ ВПО НГЛУ.

Специальность: 030602.65 – Связи с общественностью

Дисциплина: Английский язык

УДК 811.111 (0.75.8)

ББК 81.432.1-93

К 174

Формула успеха. Читаем и обсуждаем по-английски: Учебное пособие – Нижний Новгород: Нижегородский государственный лингвистический университет им. Н.А.Добролюбова, 2010 – 134 с.

Предлагаемое учебное пособие составлено на основе мемуаров американского мультимиллионера Дж.Марриота и имеет целью ознакомление студентов с особенностями профессиональной деятельности в контексте иноязычной деловой культуры и языка.

Составитель В.А.Калмыков, канд. филол. наук, доцент

Рецензенты: доктор филологических наук, профессор

М.В.Цветкова

Кандидат филологических наук, доцент

И.В.Самойлова

© ГОУ ВПО НГЛУ, 2010

© Калмыков В.А., 2010

Contents:

Preface ……………………………………………………………..	4
Part 1. Managers and Executives …………………………………..	9
Part 2. Systems and Procedures……………………………………..	19
Part 3. Management and Labor……………………………………..	32
Part 4. Listening Well……………………………………………….	46
Part 5. Order and Change……………………………………………	54
Part 6. Crisis and Overconfidence…………………………………..	79
Part 7. Teamwork and Success……………………………………	92
Part 8. Decision-making and Personality……………………………	106
A Look from Inside. Changing the culture of face time……….…...	122

Preface

(by Jim Collins)

I don’t know how many times I've heard people say, "I would really like to start and build a successful company, but I don't have a great idea." More often than not, I remind them that if J. Willard Marriott had thought the same thing, the Marriott enterprise would not exist today. I enjoy telling them the story of how he began not with a great idea or a brilliant strategy, but with the simple desire to build something from the ground up and – most important – build it to last.

Like all enduring great companies, Marriott's lasting success does not come from a single great idea, brilliant strategy, lucky break, or even a single great leader. Each of these advantages – even if a company has them – does not last forever. No, the foundations of a great company lie in more fundamental attributes.

Marriott attained its stature because it shares in common certain timeless fundamentals found in such companies as Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, 3M, and Nordstrom:

1. Timeless core values and enduring purpose. Truly great companies maintain a set of core values and a core purpose that remain fixed while their business strategies and practices continually adapt to a changing world. They understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is truly sacred and what is not.

As with all great companies, Marriott's core values did not come from intellectualizing with business school professors, following fads, or listening to the rantings of management gurus. Marriott's core values can be traced back over seventy years to the personal core values of J. Willard Marriott, who wove them into the fabric of the company and then passed them along to his son Bill Marriott, Jr. There can be no distinction between a company's core values and the core values of its leadership.

Similarly, the company's core purpose – to make people away from home feel that they are among friends and are really wanted – serves as a fixed point of guidance and inspiration. This purpose can also guide strategic thinking about what not to do. Perhaps most important, this purpose provides inspiration by making clear that the company exists for more fundamental reasons than just making money. Of course, it must make money, too. Great companies generate substantial wealth, but great companies do not let the pursuit of profit divert them from their central purpose. Marriott has done its best when it has kept this lesson in mind.

Marriott's status as a great company in the next century depends directly upon how well it continues to live up to its core values and purpose while simultaneously stimulating change and progress in everything else. The company may evolve far beyond its current lines of business in the next 100 years, but to remain great, it must simultaneously remain passionately dedicated to these timeless principles no matter how much it grows or what new opportunities it pursues.

2. A relentless drive for progress. Core values and purpose alone cannot make a company great. It must also have an unceasing drive to change, improve, and renew itself. From the earliest days of the company, the Marriotts demonstrated an innate aversion to sitting still. The drive that propelled the company from a single Hot Shoppe to a multibillion-dollar global company came not from the desire to attain the trappings of success but from the passion for growth and improvement for its own sake.

In the early 1960s, Bill Marriott, Jr., commented that he hoped the company would one day be as successful as Howard Johnson, which at the time far exceeded Marriott in sales and national renown. Where is Howard Johnson today? Why has Marriott so far surpassed the vast majority of its competitors from decades past and become one of the leading corporations in the entire world? For a simple reason: While the inheritors of successful family businesses often rest on the laurels of their parents, Bill Marriott, Jr., went around putting big sharp thorns in the Marriott laurels, making it uncomfortable if not impossible to rest.

Marriott has on occasion found itself off course when it allowed this relentless discipline to wane, but brought itself back on track by reinvigorating it. The litmus test of a company's enduring greatness comes not only from its track record of success but from its ability to bounce back from setbacks, failures, and difficult times. No company has a perfect, unblemished track record; all have dark days at some point in their history.

Marriott at its best does not dwell on the question, "How well have we done?" but on the question, "How can we do better tomorrow than we did today?" This attitude of humility, along with the constant search for new challenges, commitment to audacious goals, learning from successes and failures, and belief that good never is enough, will enable the company to remain great into the next century and beyond.

3. Strength beyond the presence of any one individual. Finally, Marriott demonstrates the crucial distinction between a company with visionary leadership and a visionary company. J. Willard Marriott was a remarkable man, yet the company ultimately did not depend on him.

The sign of a great company builder lies not in being indispensable but in building a company that will surpass itself in subsequent generations. J. Willard Marriott did just that.

The next generation of Marriott management will, I hope, share the same core values and purpose that have guided the company for seventy years and simultaneously exhibit the drive to continually change and improve operating practices and business strategies. For the key to prospering and adapting in the coming decades amidst an ever-escalating rate of change is to first be clear about and resolutely dedicated to what you stand for and why that should never change. You must then be just as resolutely willing to change absolutely everything else. This rare ability to manage continuity and change is the secret of Marriott’s past-and the key to its future.

In every large hotel – hidden from the eyes and ears of guests – exists an invisible city. Behind doors, below ground, a maze of corridors connects kitchens to loading docks, housekeeping to the laundry, accounting to the communications center. An around-the-clock army of cooks, housekeepers, engineers, waiters, dishwashers, electricians, and other specialists bustle along these hallways, each member responsible for making his or her part of hotel operations run smoothly.

The lodging industry has a special term to describe this hidden world. We call it the "heart of the house."

Like hotels, every company has its "heart of the house." There, the hurly-burly of product creation, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and dozens of other vital functions takes place, largely unseen by customers and clients. Ideas are tried and discarded; decisions are debated, made, regretted, corrected; systems are fine-tuned; careers rise and fall. And with luck, a few lessons are learned along the way.

The organization has grown from a $50 million restaurant and airline catering chain with one hotel into a $12 billion global company managing more than 1,500 hotels, resorts, and time-share properties; dozens of senior living communities; and thousands of food service contracts and other special services. To give you a sense of scale, we probably prepare more meals and make up more beds each day than anyone except the U.S. Army. I'd be a liar if I pretended not to be extremely proud of what we've built on the foundation of the original A&W Root Beer stand, launched in 1927.

The path leading to today’s Marriott has not been entirely smooth, of course.

Linguistic Survey of Preface: