How "Prideology" Helped Me Inspire My Teams as CEO - Bill Walshe

Bill: I've always looked at hospitality and the obligation, not only the opportunity, but the obligation that we have as hospitality leaders in a very, very simple way. At its essence, hospitality is about a group of human beings who are driven to make other human beings happy. That's what we're here to do. I've spent years, Josiah, trying to come up with a much more rocket science-y description of what I believe hospitality should be focused on, but it keeps coming back to humanity. And we're human beings who make other human beings happy. And one of the ways I've found throughout my life that people become happy is that happiness can excel when people feel proud. I think back to being a kid, and luckily, I grew up in a wonderful home in Limerick, Ireland, where I knew that I was loved. And when parents would say, Hey, we love you. That's great. Amazing. Thank you. Love you back. If I did something and the message wasn't, we love you, but we're proud of you. That's when I felt myself stand three, three inches taller. That's when I felt my heart and brain swell with doing something good. So I then took that as the primary focus for me in my hospitality leadership career, combined with the fact that I kind of love the idea of oxymoron. I think that a modern luxury hospitality company is oxymoronic. And that contradiction expressed through the oxymoron is consistent individuality. And I think that where magic in hospitality happens is at the point of collision between those two opposing forces. I think that the role of a senior hospitality leader in luxury is to curate that moment. Our job is to make sure that the brands, the companies, the operations that we run have a sufficient degree of consistency to ensure that we do what we need to do well every time. But Our role is to make sure that the application of consistency stops short before suffocating individuality and spontaneity and the opportunity to do things differently. So I've always been fascinated with this idea of consistent individuality and that kind of collision point that I talk about. And I believe that by making guests proud, we make our colleagues in the industry proud. And then I came to realize that when that happens when those magic moments occur, it's often by accident. Because I looked at us as an industry and realized that we are absolutely fantastic when it comes to standard operating practices, policies, and procedures, we could talk about them for as much light as there is in the day. We're pretty good at talking about how we do those things that we need to do. And usually, we stutter and splutter when it comes to talking about why we do what we do. And I became obsessed with the idea of putting a roadmap in place, an ideological roadmap for hospitality that would allow us to put as much effort into articulating why we do what we do as hospitality leaders and not just leapfrogging forward to focusing on how we do those things that we do, which typically had been the case. And I figured out if you had this ideology, it would ultimately make people proud. So I was left with these two ideas, pride and ideology, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. Then I looked around, and I saw that a lot of my friends here in Los Angeles are in the entertainment industry. And what the entertainment industry does when they have two words that have come together, they just make up a new word. It's like all of the kind of star couple Bennifers and whatever may have happened over the years. So I thought I've got this idea of pride and ideology, put them together for the concept of Prideology, and ultimately have scripted an unscripted approach to what makes hospitality magic.