Episode 104 - Chip Conley, Joie de Vivre on Creating a Culture of Recognition, Potka’s Scorecard and Finding Your Calling
Chip created a boutique hotel chain of niche targeted properties and is the author of several books, including “PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.” In this episode we talk about Maslow’s Hierarchies as Chip has applied them to The Customer, The Employee and The Investor.
Get Chip’s “Peak Prescriptions” for creating a culture of recognition and providing inspirational work that goes beyond a job or even career for employees and creates their “calling.”
Then Chip takes us on a tour of Asia, with highlights of his many trips to Bali.
Transcript
Transcript
Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Chip Conley. Chip is the founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, a fantastic chain of hotels in California. And he’s also the author of a book you absolutely have to read. It’s going to change your work life. It’s called Peak, p-e-a-k, How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. And I want to welcome Chip on the show. Welcome.
Chip Conley: Well I’m impressed. First of all you got Joie de Vivre right in the pronunciation and you said Mojo and Maslow without having said it ten times fast. I mean, it’s not easy, but it’s great to be here.
Susan Bratton: I tried to give it that little Mike Myers Mojo spin too…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: It’s a little touch of Mike Myers in the Mojo. And I have to say Chip, it’s so nice to meet you because I’ve really thoroughly enjoyed your book and I love your hotels, I stay in them every chance I get, so I’m actually already a customer and a fan.
Chip Conley: Thank you. We have 38 boutique hotels, each with its own name around the state of California and we’re the second largest boutique hotel here in the US.
Susan Bratton: Well here’s the other neat thing; so Chip and I are together for this show. I’ve come up to his offices in San Francisco, so I’m in the gorgeous corner office with Chip, and the neatest thing about it is that, of course I’ve brought my little mic stand setup, and the mic stands are too short, I need to get something a little higher ‘cause we’re both tall, and I said, “Hey, I’m going to just prop these up with some books”, I grab two books off the shelf and tell us what they are. They’re so important, they’re important.
Chip Conley: It’s amazing you picked these two books, but they’re the journals of Abraham Maslow, a psychologist from the 20th century, a quite famous one, and these are his journals from the last ten years of his life that his family gave me when I was working on the book. So, you know, you know, you certainly have a great intuitive, the foundation of our conversation today will be Maslow…
Susan Bratton: Yes.
Chip Conley: and in fact it’s the foundation of holding up mics.
Susan Bratton: I love that, it’s so perfect.
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: And it’s no coincidence, absolutely none. So I want to start out with an anecdote from your book Peak that I think sums up the empowerment that is possible in general. I left this book feeling so empowered with things that I could actually do to change the lives of people who work for me and work with me and experience my company. But start us off with the story of Potka.
Chip Conley: Oh, Potka’s my grandpa and, you know, he was somebody who actually took me out golfing all the time, and I wasn’t the best golfer, didn’t enjoy it all that much and, but I, you know, was sort of tough on myself, and I remember one day it was a gorgeous day outside and my, I was, you know, hitting a ball out on the fairway and I just duffed the ball, it went off to the side, and I just sort of threw my club on the ground, I was 12 years old, and Potka picked up the club, gave it to me and he said, you know, “What is it that, you know, what do you define as success in your life”, those weren’t the exact words he used, but he basically said, you know, “There’s so many things for you to enjoy out here. You can enjoy the beautiful sky, there’s a squirrel over there, look at that squirrel. There’s so many things for you to enjoy. You’re maybe focusing on the wrong thing here. We’re out here enjoying company out here, talking, and you’re focused on that one thing, which is…
Susan Bratton: The score.
Chip Conley: getting the ball in the hole and the score”, exactly, “So maybe you need to rethink your, you know, how you’re keeping score.” So that’s something I’ve kept with me for, you know, my whole life, and I think one of the keys of my life is to sometimes move from the tangible square card that we’re all familiar with, and I went to Stanford Business School and of course they train you in, you know, all kinds of tangible…
Susan Bratton: They have uber score cards…
Chip Conley: They do.
Susan Bratton: at Stanford.
Chip Conley: And to look at some of the intangibles, and that’s why, part of the reason I named my company Joie de Vivre, meaning Joy of Life, it’s very much my intangible score card of whether I’m living a good life.
Susan Bratton: Yeah. So every time you’re frustrated by something ask yourself what Paca asked Chip, which is what score card are you using in this moment and how could you change score cards and make this a much happier situation?
Chip Conley: And a very good one for the economy we’re in right now.
Susan Bratton: Definitely. Yeah.
Chip Conley: I just came back from Bhutan, which is a…
Susan Bratton: Right, we’re going to talk about that.
Chip Conley: a country that actually has a different score card.
Susan Bratton: Well lets talk about it right now…
Chip Conley: Sure.
Chip Conley: ‘Cause I want to get to the hotels, but I wanted to ask you about your trip to Bhutan. You’ve blogged about it so people can find it very easy to find your blog, but tell us about your trip in the country of happiness.
Chip Conley: Well yeah, Bhutan’s a fascinating place. It’s directly below China and above India, 38 percent of the worlds population actually border Bhutan. Bhutan, as a country, is the size of Switzerland, as a number of people, it has about as many people as San Francisco, 700,000 people. The king of Bhutan 37 years ago said at a meeting once, “Why is it countries focus on gross domestic product, GDP, when we could focus on gross national happiness.” He said it as sort of throw away line, but it ultimately became a movement within Bhutan and now is a worldwide movement that Bhutan’s sort of the leader of, of the idea of how do we actually create this intangible of happiness. And to use Maslow here, Abraham Maslow, I would say that Bhutan realizes they can’t create happiness for people, that we have to do for ourselves as individuals. But they can create the conditions in which happiness is more likely to flourish. And that’s really what Abraham Maslow spoke about when he actually created is hierarchy of needs pyramid and when he pretty much said to the psychology world, one of my favorite quotes of his is, that many of us have heard but didn’t know it was Maslow, is, “If the only tool you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.” That was Maslow. He was sort of saying that…
Susan Bratton: Oh he said that.
Chip Conley: He said that.
Susan Bratton: That’s, I say that statement. I said it, I thought it this morning about something…
Chip Conley: So there you go.
Susan Bratton: Isn’t that weird?
Chip Conley: That’s Abraham Maslow.
Susan Bratton: Wow, we’ve got a lot of synergy going on Chip.
Chip Conley: We do. And it has a lot to do with the idea that in the psychology world back in the 1940’s and 50’s there, they were focusing on worst practices as opposed to best practices…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: in human behavior, and it was all about, you know, dysfunction and disease in the human mind. And Maslow said, “What if we studied people who are actually fully functional, maybe even self-actualized, and what can we learn from them?” So, I, you know, he focused on how do you create the conditions for self-actualization to occur, and the best way to describe self-actualization is be all you can be – I’m stealing that from the US Army and the US, and the US Army stole it…
Susan Bratton: But they stole it from Maslow.
Chip Conley: Exactly. So, you know, that’s really what Maslow talked about, that’s what Butan’s trying to do and frankly with my book and with my company that’s what I’ve tried to do is create the conditions in which self-actualization can occur for our employees, our customers and maybe even our investors.
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. Absolutely, because you have, what, 40 hotels now?
Chip Conley: 38. 38 boutique hotels…
Susan Bratton: Okay.
Chip Conley: 20 restaurants, 4 spas, we’re about a quarter billion dollar company in terms of our annual revenues, so we’re a large company now. I started it when I was 26 when I was a couple years out of Stanford Business School.
Susan Bratton: I love the story of how you started it. You wanted to hobnob with rock and rollers and you started a hotel to cater to them, which is smart. You created what you wanted.
Chip Conley: I created, yeah, I learned to, you know, I wrote a book a few years ago called The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself In Business, Richard Branson wrote the forward of the book and the number one thing I learned from Richard Branson was his mantra is “I am the market”, “I am the market”, and he, that’s his mantra when he creates a business. Is he thrilling himself? Well at age 26 the hotel I would want to stay in if I was coming to San Francisco was a sort of funky cool offbeat, affordable…
Susan Bratton: Irreverent.
Chip Conley: irreverent….
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: Exactly.
Susan Bratton: ‘Cause you were 26 for gods sakes…
Chip Conley: I was.
Susan Bratton: If you’re not irreverent when you’re 26, you know…
Chip Conley: Yeah, you’re in trouble.
Susan Bratton: Yes.
Chip Conley: Yeah, you’re going to grow old very quickly.
Susan Bratton: Right.
Chip Conley: So I did, and the place is called The Phoenix, it’s been around for 22 years and, yeah, the idea that I was reaching out to a customer that most Hilton’s and Marriott’s didn’t want, which is rock and roll bands and…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: musicians and entertainers and creative types was our niche. And I think frankly if you’re a small company your best strategy is to go niche.
Susan Bratton: Well you say that you model a lot of your hotels, every one of your hotels is extremely unique. You think about a vertical segment, a psychographic segment of a customer, you have five words that define them. Give us a couple examples of some of your hotels that you think have the most clever niches.
Chip Conley: Oh, well there’s just all kinds of them. I mean we’ve got…
Susan Bratton: There’s 38.
Chip Conley: We could spend 30 minutes just on this alone. I’ll be brief though. Yeah, boutique hotels and magazine publishing have something in common; they’re both niche oriented, lifestyle oriented and if we get it right in the boutique hotel business we have a core group of customers who go out and tell the world. We’re a 250 billion dollar, 250 million dollar a year company and we only spend 50,000 dollars a year on traditional advertising. So getting that right psychographic fit is sort of like, what magazine also try to do. So every time we create a hotel it’s based upon a magazine. The first one, the Phoenix, the rock and roll hotel…
Susan Bratton: Rolling Stone.
Chip Conley: was based upon the Rolling Stone, yeah. Funky, irreverent, adventurous, cool and young at heart, those five adjectives define the product we created from the kind of art we chose, the core in the rooms, the kind of unique services, the amenities, even the staff we hired, we hired funky irreverent staff. So every time we create a hotel it’s based upon that. So the hotel Rex here in San Francisco is New Yorker magazine…
Susan Bratton: Library.
Chip Conley: Library, artistic…
Susan Bratton: literate, literary.
Chip Conley: Yeah…
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.
Chip Conley: Literate, clever, artistic, sophisticated, worldly…
Susan Bratton: The new Algonquin for San Francisco, right?
Chip Conley: Exactly.
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.
Chip Conley: The Hotel Vitale here in San Francisco, which is a luxury hotel on the waterfront…
Susan Bratton: Fall chic.
Chip Conley: It’s very… You know it girl. I mean, Susan’s done her homework. She knows this stuff…
Susan Bratton: I’ve been there.
Chip Conley: She’s stayed there, so… The Hotel Vitale is real simple, meets Dwell magazine. It’s modern, urban, fresh, natural and nurturing. We just created a hotel in San Francisco called The Good Hotel…
Susan Bratton: I saw that. That’s your kind of like your…
Chip Conley: Good magazine.
Susan Bratton: low budget, right…
Chip Conley: That’s our low budget…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: but high aspiration…
Susan Bratton: Yes.
Chip Conley: kind of hotel, which is all about voluntourism, the idea that people come to San Francisco and they actually want to give back. It’s sort of for, regardless of what your politics are, you know that there’s a bunch of sort of 20 somethings who voted for Obama, and there’s a lot of people in the world who want to go out and make a difference.
Susan Bratton: Activists.
Chip Conley: Activists and people who want to sort of say, their most important metric for their definition of success has very little to do with how…
Susan Bratton: Not money, no money.
Chip Conley: much money you’re making.
Susan Bratton: Right.
Chip Conley: So those folks want a place that’s affordable, cool green and…
Susan Bratton: Yeah, cultural creative.
Chip Conley: and connects them to somehow the local philanthropic community, and that’s what we do, we have a philanthropic concierge there who actually helps a person if they want to actually connect with, give, if you want to do some, do some time in San Francisco like volunteering for the homeless or for planting trees in town or being involved with, you know, kids in the inner city, we give those opportunities.
Susan Bratton: Oh, tell me, do the last one as your, one of your new beachside, you’re moving into beachside, you’re going South…
Chip Conley: Big time, yes.
Susan Bratton: You’re going into the beaches…
Chip Conley: Southern California we have, we are launching for the Summer…
Susan Bratton: You just launched, what, Sea…
Chip Conley: Shore Break…
Susan Bratton: Shore Break…
Chip Conley: In Huntington Beach.
Susan Bratton: That’s your first one, Huntington Beach, yup.
Chip Conley: The Hotel Irwin in Venice Beach…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: The Hotel Maya in Long Beach…
Susan Bratton: Right.
Chip Conley: And then the Pacific Edge in Laguna Beach. So…
Susan Bratton: Right.
Chip Conley: four Southern California beach front hotels all opening at the same time, each with it’s own different sort of psychographic group.
Susan Bratton: And which one is your personal favorite?
Chip Conley: Of all the hotels within the whole group?
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: You know, it all depends on my personality. I mean…
Susan Bratton: Your mood.
Chip Conley: emotional level, the Phoenix is, although…
Susan Bratton: Right, ‘cause it’s your baby.
Chip Conley: You know, I’m not funky and irreverent anymore…
Susan Bratton: Yeah Chip, you’ve grown up now.
Chip Conley: Oh yeah…
Susan Bratton: You’re wearing an Oxford button-down, you’re looking more Stanford…
Chip Conley: I am so conservative today, I am so… Well, I know, I know. Vitale is probably the best fit for my personality…
Susan Bratton: Uh huh.
Chip Conley: I love Ventana, we took over the Ventana Inn.
Susan Bratton: I heard you had a fire, I think…
Chip Conley: We had a fire.
Susan Bratton: I heard it was like a disaster over there.
Chip Conley: Well there was a huge fire in Big Sir…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: and as soon as the whole Big Sir fire…
Susan Bratton: Right.
Chip Conley: was finished, our restaurant burned down, just…
Susan Bratton: That’s what I heard, yeah.
Chip Conley: But the, we have a new Bistro there that’s opened, the new restaurant will open at the end of the Summer and the hotel, amazing resort there on the Big Sir cliffs is still open and doing great, so…
Susan Bratton: Oh, I’ll have to try that out. I always liked the Post Ranch Inn.
Chip Conley: I like it too.
Susan Bratton: That’s an amazing…
Chip Conley: I like the…
Susan Bratton: That’s a good, from a hotelier’s perspective you must really enjoy that, what they’ve done there.
Chip Conley: I love the Post Ranch Inn, I think it’s, they’ve done a phenomenal job, so… And Big Sir’s a, you know, the kind of place where you think big thoughts.
Susan Bratton: Love it, love it, absolutely. Well I, I’ve got to go back now to the triangles…
Chip Conley: Mm hmm.
Susan Bratton: You see the world through hearts and triangles…
Chip Conley: Pyramids, pyramids, but triangles…
Susan Bratton: Pyramids, thank you.
Chip Conley: Yeah…
Susan Bratton: Yeah, you have some dimensionality to that that I left on the table…
Chip Conley: Exactly.
Susan Bratton: I apologize.
Chip Conley: A triangle has one dimension…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: and a pyramid has three, so…
Susan Bratton: So lets take the pyramid…
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: Describe the, you have envisioned three pyramids - the employee pyramid, the customer pyramid, the investor pyramid - based on Maslow’s hierarchy brought to the corporate culture, or as you call it charmic capitalism. I’d like to focus on the customer and the employee…
Chip Conley: Mm hmm.
Susan Bratton: just for this conversation…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: Anyone who wants to should absolutely pick up your book, but…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: Give us a little bit of that pyramidical hierarchy.
Chip Conley: Yeah, lets go back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s a five level pyramid, Maslow, and Maslow starts with physiological needs at the base of the pyramid. Safety needs, second level. Third level is social belonging needs. Fourth level is esteem needs. And the fifth level is self-actualization. That’s what Maslow came up with in the mid 20th century and it’s pretty famous. In looking at those five levels, I translated it into three levels. There’s really three key themes going on here. There’s survival, which is the first level, physiological and safety. There’s success, which is social belonging needs and esteem needs, levels three and four in this pyramid. And then at the top of the pyramid, self-actualization is really sort of a transformation, and when you actually are in that self- actualized state feeling, you know, sort of at one with the world and being all you can be you do feel somewhat transformed, and so, and so think of survival, succeed, transform, going up a pyramid. Okay, take that, what I call the transformation pyramid - a survival, succeed, transform – and now apply it to employees. So the employee piece of this puzzle would be, at the base the survival need is money or the compensation package. The succeed need is recognition. And at the top of the pyramid the self-actualization need or transformation need is having a sense of meaning in what you do and what the organization does. So part of the reason this became very valuable to us, and we really created this during the last downturn, is it helped us to create a language around something that we deeply felt but we didn’t have a way of actually expressing it or maybe even quantifying it and understanding these intangible needs at the top of the pyramid are very valuable. It’s like Mastercard, you know, their commercial, what’s…
Susan Bratton: Priceless.
Chip Conley: (unintelligible) is what’s priceless…
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.
Chip Conley: Everything else you have Mastercard. Well the reality is what’s valuable in life is what’s priceless and generally those things are more intangible. Businesses have a tendency to get distracted by the tangible because we measure them and they’re easier to measure. But just measuring what’s at the base of the pyramid isn’t good enough. And I think the best example that Marcus Buckingham, who you know, has done studies and others have too showing that money is not the number one reason people leave their job, it’s the fourth place usually. The number one reason people leave their job is because of recognition. So how do you create a culture of recognition both formally and informally? That’s actually what creates loyalty. People are less loyal to the money and more loyal to the people who surround them, and, you know, as Marcus has said people join companies and they leave their boss. And so that’s the second level, that’s the success level. But at the top of the employee pyramid is this idea of meaning, a very ethereal kind of concept, but why is that important? Well today, first of all I think there’s not doubt, and since the 1970’s for sure, there’s been a sort of personal transformation movement in the world. Seems that always California has been ahead of the game here, but generally there’s been some personal transformation. There’s a sense that people have, oh, this feeling that they’re here on earth for a reason and their, part of the mystery and secret in life is to figure out what your personal reason is. And so what’s interesting is I think what’s happened is the corporate world is starting to actually get to that place of seeing personal, corporate transformation can actually follow personal transformation. So people more and more are looking at their work and saying, “This is such a dominant part of my life. I need to have personal, I need to have a personal transformation in the workplace.” Companies are realizing that, and in so realizing, they’re realizing that they have to address this meaning need at the top of the pyramid; what is the organization doing to create meaning, and then what are we doing for the individuals within the organization to try to give them personal meaning in what they’re doing. We all don’t do this perfectly, but if you actually use that as a language and a way of thinking of your organization, you’re more likely to create employees who have a calling. And there’s three kind of relationship you can have with your work; it’s a job or a career or a calling, and interestingly enough, and I love this, the fact that moving up the pyramid from money to recognition to meaning, you’re actually sort of going up from job to career to calling. Those people who are focused on the meaning in what they do are intrinsically motivated and inspired by what they’re doing. They don’t need the extrinsic or external motivators of money or recognition. And if you can create an environment where you’re employee pool is living their calling, you’re going to have a much more successful company.
Susan Bratton: I want to go double back on a couple of things that you said, but I also want to let you know that I finally found my calling, and I loved that you showed me how I had evolved because I certainly have had many jobs and I’ve had a great career in advertising and media, but now at Personal Life Media the content that I’m creating using all my knowledge of consumers and what they want and bringing them conscious content, that’s my calling, being able to provide the technology platform for experts, like… We have a show called Your Purpose Centered Life. It’s all about how you divine your life purpose. There’s nothing out there like that, it’s very difficult….you go to workshops, you might take a landmark, but you can also listen to a podcast about it. And my calling is providing the technology platform for people, like Dr. Eric Mazel, to bring that to whoever wants it. And so I really enjoyed that part of it. I want to take a short break, and when we come back I want to dig into how you create this culture of recognition, and in your book you have this, after a lot of the chapters you offer these Peak prescriptions, so Dr. Chip, are you in?
Chip Conley: I’m in.
Susan Bratton: Good. So when we come back from break I want a Peak prescription for how you, you know, how you create a culture of recognition, because you say it’s bigger than money, so lets figure that out. I’m your host Susan Bratton. We’re with Chip Conley, CEO and founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow, and we will be right back.
Susan Bratton: We’re back with Chip Conley, founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality and author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. It was good to get that primer in Maslow. And when we left for the break Chip we were talking about what’s bigger than money, and that’s recognition and you’re going to give us some prescriptions or a couple ideas for how we create that in our business culture.
Chip Conley: Well let me give you something you can start doing tomorrow. Most companies have meetings. Okay, we all have meetings. So how do you end your meetings? I mean generally in a bad economy meetings can be pretty depressing. You get together and talk about everything that’s going wrong. One of the things we started doing back in 2002 during the last downturn is we changed how we ended our meetings. We had a two hour executive committee meeting with out top fifteen employee, top fifteen executives in the company, and these meetings were really pretty depressing back then, there was a lot of bad news. So we decided to take the last ten minutes of the two hour meeting and focus on recognition. So any of us at the meeting, these weekly meetings could bring an example of someone in the company, usually at the line level, hourly staff of our hotels or restaurants or spas, somebody that had done something amazing. Like, you know, Joe the bellman at the Hotel Rex who, when the Hotel Rex had, which has one elevator, when the elevator went down for two days unfortunately he worked sixteen hours a day for two days in a row while he had family in town because the hotel needed some additional support to, you know, schlep the bags up and down the stairs. So the vice president of operations might come to the meeting and say, “I want to just recognize Joe.” Someone else at the meeting might say, “Okay, I’m going to go and say thank you to Joe.” It, we would usually have somebody who is from a different department go recognize Joe. So three things came out of this, and this is why you could start doing this tomorrow. Number one is we ended our meetings on a positive note that helped remind us of some of the great things that were being done in the company, because a lot of times what happens is you start getting into this inferior, you start feeling like maybe there’s something wrong with you because the economy starts making you feel like you’re just doing everything badly, and that’s, you know, that can be a really bad cycle you can get into. So the idea that we ended the meeting on a positive note helped give all of us a little bit more sense of meaning. Number two is Joe got recognized. You know, Joe out there in the field had someone, you know, come up to him and say, come up to him and say, “Great job”, and they caught him doing something right. You know, we have, our sort of culture in most companies is to catch someone doing something wrong. So Joe appreciated that, and everybody around Joe for the next 24 hours felt his glow because he had been recognized. And then finally, and this is the most interesting piece that I was not expecting, the fact that the actual recognition came from someone from a different department in the company, like…
Susan Bratton: Yeah, how did that impact?
Chip Conley: Well the fact is Joe’s in the operations department because he’s in hotel operations, but the fact that someone from marketing or from IT actually came and said thank you to Joe made him feel like, number one it’s like, “Wow, this is a big deal because this is actually beyond just my department. Actually this is people from another department”, and then number two, it’s actually created a little bit… You know, what happens in companies is silos…
Susan Bratton: Silos, yeah.
Chip Conley: And so what this did is it created sort of a cross fertilizing element of Joe saying…
Susan Bratton: The silo buster.
Chip Conley: Yeah, those geeks in IT aren’t so bad, huh? And so, so it was great and just something anybody can do in any organization, for profit, non profit, you can start doing it, you know, tomorrow.
Susan Bratton: I love it. Certainly when, you and I both know Dacher Keltner…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: and he’s been on the show, we talked about the science of a meaningful life, and the number one thing that Dacher promotes in having a happy life is gratitude…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: Expressing gratitude is the single thing that can turn your life from one of misery to meaning, and I believe you can turn your culture from misery to meaning be expressing gratitude.
Chip Conley: And one of the things I learned from going to Bhutan was it’s a culture of gratitude and the, America tends to be a culture of gratification.
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: And so, you know, the ultimate happiness is sort of happy, I’m all about emotional equations now. This is my next book, Emotional Equations and it’s…
Susan Bratton: Oh really? Is that the name of it?
Chip Conley: Uh huh.
Susan Bratton: And you’re working on it now?
Chip Conley: I’m working on it now…
Susan Bratton: Oh good for you. You like to write, you’re a writer.
Chip Conley: I love writing, yeah…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: That’s my calling now. So, and happiness equals wanting what you have divided by having what you want. Meaning wanting what you have is really the idea of having gratitude about what you, what you have, and we don’t do enough of that. And actually Maslow interestingly enough wrote a lot about gratitude also, and he suggested that people do gratitude journals, which is something that started to be done, you know, ten or twenty years later.
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: It’s interesting too, I picked up from The Science, The Science For Greater Good, the…
Chip Conley: Mm hmm.
Susan Bratton: the place where Dacher works…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: from Christine Carter who we also met at the happiness conference…
Chip Conley: Yup.
Susan Bratton: you and I. I do this thing with my daughter now where I ask her to tell me three things that she’s grateful for, and I ask her a couple of times a week and the rule is you can never say the same thing twice. So you can’t say, “I’m grateful for my Sheltie puppy” more than one time, you have to come up with something else. The level of appreciation she has for what, how lucky she is has really increased because she is so lucky. I like that a lot.
Chip Conley: Well I do too, and in the book even, in Peak, I actually talk about Café Gratitude, which I won’t go into right now…
Susan Bratton: Oh yeah, right.
Chip Conley: Which is…
Susan Bratton: I don’t like that place…
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: It’s too much nut paced for me.
Chip Conley: That’s fine, that’s fine, but…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: But it’s a restaurant that now has five of them…
Susan Bratton: Pure California…
Chip Conley: It’s all about gratitude.
Susan Bratton: It’s San Francisco though.
Chip Conley: It’s very gratitude based, so… Lets move on.
Susan Bratton: Alright. Now you raised two children, right?
Chip Conley: I raised one child who has…
Susan Bratton: One boy…
Chip Conley: one boy who’s 32 now. Basically my first hotel was in the inner city of San Francisco…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Chip Conley: and I became his tutor initially and then when his mother and father ended up on the streets, because she was a prostitute and he was a drug dealer, he ended up homeless and in a group youth home and he basically became my son when he was 15…
Susan Bratton: Wow!
Chip Conley: And he’s got three kids now, so I am a grandpa.
Susan Bratton: You’re a Potka.
Chip Conley: I’m a Potka.
Susan Bratton: Do they call you Potka?
Chip Conley: They do not.
Susan Bratton: Oh, you probably don’t want to do that…
Chip Conley: No.
Susan Bratton: It sounds like pot belly or something, doesn’t it?
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: You’re way too tall and slim and trim for being a Potka.
Chip Conley: I’m not Potka, but I…
Susan Bratton: Maybe you’ll grow into Potka.
Chip Conley: Hopefully I have given them some wisdom along the way just like Potka did for me.
Susan Bratton: Yeah. Oh, I think you have. I have a feeling…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: that has, the download has transpired. So, that’s so neat that you’ve done that. When I was getting for the interview with you I sent you a series of questions…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: and you responded, and one of the questions that I ask a lot of people is, it’s the 21st century… First of all, I don’t know how that happened. It is the 21st century, right?
Chip Conley: Yes, yes.
Susan Bratton: I mean, whoa! That’s crazy, isn’t it? How’d that happen on our watch?
Chip Conley: We’re almost a tenth of the way through it.
Susan Bratton: Whoa!
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: That was another level set for me.
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: I seldom know what year it is, but the, we’ve got this new era of business, the conscious capitalism, the charmic capitalism…
Chip Conley: Mm hmm.
Susan Bratton: creating meaning in the workplace, the fact that our work is our community now…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: Our company or our industry is our community. I’ll tell you that everyone who is listening to Dishy Mix right now, they are so connected into the media marketing advertising web 2.0 world. I mean it is absolutely a community of people who…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: party together, live their lives together…
Chip Conley: Well and in some ways it’s a community that’s through the web now. I mean…
Susan Bratton: Well we’re all Twittering each other and blogging…
Chip Conley: Well and there’s people who become part of your community that you’ve never met and…
Susan Bratton: Yeah, friendsters they’re called. Not your friends, your friendsters…
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: That’s the new thing.
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: Yeah, but there as important to you in many ways as the friends who are in, what do they call it, meet space.
Chip Conley: Yes. Now we’re talking about bars.
Susan Bratton: No, not any more. I got a DM, a direct Twitter message, from a friend of mine, Chris Hure, and he said, “We have to meet IRL”, and I thought to myself, “IRL? Oh, in real life.”
Chip Conley: That’s good.
Susan Bratton: Isn’t that good?
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: IRL, that’s meet space. IRL equals meet space…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: You can put that in your new Emotional Equations book.
Chip Conley: Emotional Equations book, yes.
Susan Bratton: So the question I have for you, getting back…
Chip Conley: Yes.
Susan Bratton: to the question, was all my guests want the 21st century business world to stop being so short term mentality…
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: They’re sick of the 30 day “what have you done for me lately”, they never get the opportunity to think beyond that, and they feel in many ways caught in a culture, a corporate culture that does not allow them the latitude to think bigger. What can they do?
Chip Conley: Well, it’s a great question. Obviously whether you’re a public or a private company it has some bearing on this. The public company market place is based upon quarterly earnings…
Susan Bratton: It’s all screwed up.
Chip Coley: And it’s all screwed up, and, you know, there may be some hope there. The good news is the most famous investor in America is Warren Buffet, and Warren Buffet is not a quarterly investor and everybody gets that. And with time I think more and more of the admiration that his company, Berkshire Hathaway and he has, is starting to build a new culture of investors who are more long term oriented, and in chapters ten through twelve in Peak I really talk a lot about that. But in private companies it’s just as rampant. I mean people can be very short term oriented, especially in a downturn where people, their survival needs are being focused, being triggered. Long story short is more and more companies need to show that a long term sort of purpose driven, and meaning driven approach to business is one that actually is successful. Here’s my best answer to this is that Fortune Magazine every year does a story, a cover story on the 50 most American companies in the world. This year two months ago, in March, they came out with their issue and of the top eight of the 50 six of the eight are what I call actualized companies that were profiled in Peak: Apple, Google, Berkshire Hathaway, Southwest Airlines, FedEx, one other that I’m not thinking of right now. Did I say Apple, yes I did. So…
Susan Bratton: It’s okay, we’ll look it up if we…
Chip Conley: Yeah. So these actualized companies, interestingly enough those companies are most admired by the business leaders of the world are those that are most actualized, and the ones that are most actualized have a tendency to be long term oriented. So I think what we’re seeing is the results, there was a time ten or twenty years ago when those of us in the business world who said this is the way to do it didn’t have empirical results to back it up. But now there’s books like Firms of Endearment and similar books like that that have done, or they have professors from business schools that have studied, that those companies are more long term focused in how they actually do their business strategy are more successful over the course of a ten year period. So I think that what we have to do is just help to change some of the mentality that short term earnings are what creates long term results. What we have to recognize is sometimes short term earnings actually creates long term…
Susan Bratton: Pain.
Chip Conley: disability…
Susan Bratton: Right, disease.
Chip Conley: for a company.
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. That’s right. Well, and the other thing that I was thinking is that if you’re, if you were the person in your organization that wants to have an actualized company, why don’t you take the stand to create it. Why don’t you as the person who is frustrated by the 30 day mentality carve out some time to get a group of people together to figure out what the long term give back, what the long term plan could be for your organization. How would the culture need to shift? Could you not be the person who leads that initiative to entirely change your organization? I think you could.
Chip Conley: Yes. I agree.
Susan Bratton: I say yes. I say raise your hand, step up, make your move. I was talking about Tony Robbins yesterday and we were talking about making your move. Have you done his, god, fire walking and all that stuff?
Chip Conley: I have not, no.
Susan Bratton: You have to go.
Chip Conley: Okay.
Susan Bratton: It’s a weekend experience…
Chip Conley: But that’s so 20th century, that’s so…
Susan Bratton: It’s really fun. He’s not 20th… You’d be surprised.
Chip Conley: Here’s the good news…
Susan Bratton: He is a self actualized man.
Chip Conley: He’s a regular guest at our Hotel Vitale and he…
Susan Bratton: He is. I know, he likes to stay there, yeah.
Chip Conley: And he’s a big fan of Peak. He actually got a, I gave him a copy of Peak, he read it and he just sent me a nice not and said thank you, it was his kind of book, so…
Susan Bratton: That’s great.
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: Yup. Well, you should do it. It’s a good treat.
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: So this is the last question and it’s a more personal question…
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: and you have been a big proponent of Southeast Asia. You’ve taken a lot of trips there. You had your 35th birthday party in Bali…
Chip Conley: Which was a long time ago.
Susan Bratton: And I have it… It’s not that long ago. You’re not Potka yet. I haven’t had a chance to go to that are of the world…
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: and a lot of us haven’t yet…
Chip Conley: Right.
Susan Bratton: and you’ve been many times. Could you tell us what we need to know to have an amazing experience? Maybe the three places you’d go or…
Chip Conley: Sure.
Susan Bratton: the things you must see. Tell us the story.
Chip Conley: Well lets just say, lets first recognize just on a sort of demographic basis that, you know, over 50 percent of the worlds population, in fact close to 60 percent is in Asia. So as Asia becomes more developed it’s going to have a more dominant role on just how the world works. So that’s sort of, you know, the left brain approach to thinking about it. The right brain approach is that it’s a fascinating place because the cultures there have a lot to teach us. The three places that I would recommend, and give you some visual elements to them, is my first choice would be Bali. Bali is an island, it’s part of Indonesia. Indonesia’s the largest Muslim country in the world. Strangely enough, Bali, as an island within Indonesia, it’s not Muslim, it’s actually, it’s Hindu but it’s not even Hindu, it’s Animist, which sort of means that everything has a spirit, even a piece of paper or a…
Susan Bratton: Like Native American.
Chip Conley: Yeah, very much so. So when you have a culture that sort of believes that everything has spirit, you have a certain reverence for everything. And the art and spirituality on the island is so rampant, it’s almost like air or like water. You know, they say a fish doesn’t know, you know, the word water, well it’s, and… You know, in Bali they don’t know the word art or spirit because it’s so prevalent. So it’s a fascinating culture. Bhutan, you know, is in not exactly Southeast Asia but sort of close to it. You know, as a culture that feels hundreds of years old, when you’re there you sort of feel like this is, there’s a reverence for history and the sort of cultural roots of that country and the country’s never been conquered, so it’s a great place but it’s a place that’s going to change because frankly they only allow 50, about 50 tourists a day into the country. Amazing a country would even do that. And so as they start to let more people in that’ll change. That’s a good one to see soon. If I said the third place that, I think, you know, Japan. I’ve only been to Japan once and there’s a lot of things about Japan that don’t make me excited, but the visual elements of being in a Japanese garden and the Zen like nature of water, the sound of water and how they use water as a tranquility provider in urban settings, but also in the country and the kinds of sort of Japanese spas they, country spas they have. Fascinating…
Susan Bratton: What are those Japanese country spas called? They have a name…
Chip Conley: I think Onsen, I think they’re called Onsen…
Susan Bratton: Onsen? Okay.
Chip Conley: Yeah, that’s one word that is sometimes is used for that and, or Recon, I think that’s another one that’s used. They, it’s just a, you know, it’s a different way of life, so yes. And back to Bali once again; the best thing about Bali is just walking or riding a bike through a grassy field where you just see, you know, rice patty fields with waterfalls and the scent of incense in the air and just this sense, the sense of just visual, it’s a visual feast, it’s a sensual feast.
Susan Bratton: That sounds so beautiful.
Chip Conley: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: Thank you for that great story.
Chip Conley: Sure.
Susan Bratton: I really appreciate that. I’d like to be transported. So you’re going to do something nice for Dishy Mix fans I hear.
Chip Conley: Yes…
Susan Bratton: What are you going to do?
Chip Conley: I guess I’m giving away a couple of signed copies of Peak.
Susan Bratton: That’s so nice. Personally autographed copies…
Chip Conley: Yes, yes.
Susan Bratton: to boot. So if you would like a copy of Peak and you’d like it personally autographed by Chip, he has two, and all you need to do is go to dishymixfan.com, that’ll take you to the Face Book fan page for the show, fan up the show, post your desire and Chip and I will pick our two favorites and you will have your Peak experience. Chip, it’s been terrific to be with you. Thank you so much.
Chip Conley: Oh, thank you Susan. Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. We could go on for hours.
Susan Bratton: We could, definitely. Well maybe we’ll have you back. We will definitely have you back when your new book comes out.
Chip Conley: Thank you, thank you.
Susan Bratton: We want to hear all about that.
Chip Conley: Great.
Susan Bratton: Alright. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know Chip Conley, and I’ll look forward to connecting with you next week. Have a great day.