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| Chip Conley |
Chip Conley is the head of the hotel Joie de Vivre, which means the joy of living. He comes to talk on TED about what he learned from one the employees at the hotel and the King of Bhutan.
He started out by telling us that we should think about what we count, because what we count, truly counts.
Then he started talking about one of the employees at the hotel. Her name is Van Quach, she changed her name to Vivian when she came to the US to fit in. Chip Conley just happened to buy that hotel when she was working there at the time. He has been working together with Vivian for 23 years already now, and he got to know a bit about her. When he first started working with Vivian, he noticed she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work. It made Chip really curious, how can anyone find joy in cleaning toilets for a living? The more time he spent time with her, the more understanding he got. He realized that she didn't find joy in cleaning toilets, her goal wasn't to be the greatest toilet scrubber. What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and the guests. What gave her inspiration and meaning to this was just she was taking care of people who are far away from home; she knows what it's like to be far away from home.
That was the lesson Chip said he learned from her, and which helped him get through the last economic turndown. During the wake of the dotcom crash and 9/11, many of the San Francisco Bay Area hotels went through the largest percentage revenue drop in the history of American hotels.
It was during that time, Chip Conley found Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Chip said he has studied psychology before in college, and it quite familiar with his "hierarchy of needs". But the more he read, the more things he realized he didn't know before. One of them is one of the simplest facts in business, and it's also something that we often neglect. That is we are all human. Each of us, no matter what our role in society is actually has some hierarchy of needs. He found out that Maslow wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to organizations and specifically to business. But unfortunately, Maslow died before he could live that dream completely.
Chip thinks that he can actually channel Maslow. He took the five level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what Chip calls that transformation pyramid, which is survival on the bottom, success in the middle, and transformation on the top. It's not just about business anymore, it's the fundamentals of life.
Then he went to ask his employees if they know and understand the mission of the company, and do they feel like they believe in it. Can they actually influence it, and do they actually feel that their work actually has an impact on it. Then they started asking their customers if they feel an emotional connection with the hotel. As Chip does this, what he found is that they created more loyalty. Their customer loyalty skyrockets, and their employee turnover dropped.
Chip asked other leaders out there how they were getting through that time, and they told him over and over again that they just manage what they can measure. Chip is trying to say that the "what we can measure part" is at the bottom of the pyramid. People don't even see the intangible things higher up the pyramid. So how can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible?
There is actually a survey that tells us that 94 percent of the leaders worldwide believe that the intangible are important; such as intellectual property, their porporate culture, and their brand loyalty. But only 5 percent of the leaders are actually measuring it.
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Einstein
"But if that which is most valuable in our life actually can't be counted or valued, aren't we going to spend our lives just miring in measuring the mundane?" said Chip.
So Chip took off his CEO hat and went to a place that has been shrouded in mystery for centuries. Shangri la has actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world. The king there asked the world:
"Why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product? Why don't we care more about gross national happiness?" - Jigme Singye Wanghuck
Now we have a new thing to measure in a country: GNH, or gross national happiness.
For the next 34 years as king, he actually started measuring and managing around happiness Bhutan.
Chip asked him over dinner: "How can you create and measure something which evaporates, in other words, happiness?" The king answered: "Listen, Bhutan's goal is not to create happiness. We create the conditions for happiness to occur. In other words, we create a habitat of happiness."
They actually created 4 essential pillars, 9 key indicators, and 72 different metrics to measure their GNH. One of the key indicators is: How do the Bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day? How do we spend our day? Time is the most scarcest resources in the modern world.
Rabbi Hyman Schachtel wrote a book in 1954, called "The Real Enjoyment of Living". He said that happiness is not about having what you want, it's about wanting what you have. We can make up an equation that would say Happiness = Wanting what you have / Having what you want.
What the king of Bhutan started really influenced many countries already. There are already 40 countries around the world today that are actually studying their own GNH.
Now let's compare GDP with GNH.
GDP counts everything from air pollution to the destruction of redwoods. But it doesn't count the health of the people, or the integrity of our public officials. By knowing these kinds of things, doesn't it make you feel like it's time for us to start figuring out a new way to count? A new way to actually imagine what is important to us in life? Rober kennedy said once that GDP "measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
Maslow said long ago, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." GDP has been our hammer, and our nail has been the 19th and 20th century. We need to get a bigger toolbox and use some other tools.
In Vivian's case, her unit of production isn't the tangible hours she works. It's the intangible different she makes during that one hour of work.
Why is it that leaders don't see the connection between creating the intangible with creating the tangible? We don't have to choose between them, we can have both!
What really counts is when we actually use our numbers to truly take into account our people.
In conclusion, ask yourselves this:
"What can you start counting today? What one thing can you start counting today that actually would be meaningful in your life, whether it's your work life or your business life?" - Chip Conley
Watch Video here: Measuring What Makes Life Worthwhile
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