Starwood Hotels: Change Leadership Success Story

Well, we’d promised some “success stories” and now BusinessWeek has helped by profiling one of our favorite clients — Starwood Hotels — and the benefits they’ve achieved through their Six Sigma initiative. (See: http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content/aug2007/id20070830_103596.htm )

Starwood’s success is a great example of going beyond the boundaries of a program — which is what Six Sigma is at the large majority of companies who use it. Instead, Starwood has integrated principles like customer focus, testing assumptions, use of data and analysis, creative thinking and teamwork into a process for Change Leadership. They have kept the concepts clear and meaningful to regular people in the business, too, rather than overcomplicating them or trying to bury people in lots of analytical tools.

Obviously, Starwood’s approach can’t be copied “as-is,” but some of their keys to success are worth highlighting:
1- They’ve tied their efforts to the core needs of the business, involving a mix of efficiency improvement, customer satisfaction, revenue generation and innovation
2- There’s been heavy emphasis on sharing and leveraging good ideas across the business. With hundreds of hotels around the world, you don’t want everyone trying to fix the same problem. But any hotel may have a great idea that others can also adopt.
3- Persistence and consistency have been impressive. We conducted the first Executive workshop in Six Sigma for Starwood in January of 2001—less than 9 months before the September 11 attacks. Many companies would have abandoned the effort as the hospitality market nosedived, but Starwood did not. They have learned a lot and evolved their approach since then, but many of the same foundational elements are still in place today.

Starwood Hotels deserves credit as a role model for the many many companies who need to become smarter at change, and who yet get bogged down in programmatic details and tools. They have overcome these challenges and have the results to show for it.
We’ll talk more about some of the downsides, and upsides, in later posts.