Conversations From the Corner Office

FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Marriott International Inc. Chairman and CEO Bill Marriott talks with Kai Ryssdal

KAI RYSSDAL: Bill Marriott, welcome to the program.

BILL MARRIOTT: Thank you; nice to be here.

RYSSDAL: I checked in at the desk downstairs and I said, "Hi, I'm here for an interview with Mr. Marriott," and the woman looked up at me and said, "Which Mr. Marriott?" Which made me sort of realize that this is still in a lot of ways a family business.

MARRIOTT: It is. I have two sons that work in the building here. One's in charge of global sales and the other works in company culture and marketing and special events, so, today was our 50th anniversary of entering the lodging business . . .

RYSSDAL: Congratulations.

MARRIOTT: . . . and our daughter works here, but she's not named Marriott, she's named Harrison so she wouldn't have picked up on here but all three of the children, of our children, were here today for the 50th anniversary of our lodging entry and it was the greatest celebration. We all wore 50's clothes, and I wore an old Hawaiian shirt with cars all over it and a pair of jeans and a football jacket.

RYSSDAL: It's also the 80th anniversary of the company that your dad founded.

MARRIOTT: That's right.

RYSSDAL: That means really that the company has been in the Marriott family longer than you've been in the Marriott family. What do you remember from the early days?

MARRIOTT: Well my very first recollection was visiting the Hot Shoppes with my parents. Probably around 1936, 1937 I was four or five years old. I used to go with my parents. I loved what they used to call a "hamburger royal," which was a hamburger with the most delicious tomato sauce and a piece of lettuce and a tomato on it you ever saw in your life. And that was my very favorite. That, and what they used to call a frosted root beer, which was just a vanilla milkshake mix with root beer syrup in it on the blender, and it was to die for.

RYSSDAL: Your dad started the company as a nine-seat root beer stand here in Washington . . .

MARRIOTT: He did. He and my mother got a franchise for A&W Root Beer in 1927. They were married in Salt Lake City and they left the day after their marriage and drove to Washington, took them 11 days in a Model T Ford to get here and they opened this nine-stool root beer stand on the same day that Lindberg flew the Atlantic. And dad put a radio in the front window and everybody could come by and hear the progress as reported of the takeoff and the landing and all the things that were going on with Lindberg.

RYSSDAL: Are there aspects of this business today, as big as it is and as global as it is, that sort of reminds you sometimes of that root beer shop?

MARRIOTT: Well, it's all about service and it's all about people. My dad was always a great people man, as was my mother. She was even better, I think, than he was. But he soon found out how important people were to him when one day the cook didn't show up. And one day the lady that was dishing up the root beer and using the root beer mugs to serve the customers, she didn't show up, and he had a real problem.

So he decided that job number one was to take care of his people and when they were sick in the hospital he visited them, and when they got in trouble he went down and got them out of trouble where ever they were and brought them in, and when they wanted to talk to him, he was there to listen.

RYSSDAL: And you guys have made that a standard through the past 80 years, but my question is how do you do that now, take care of your own people, when there's 130,000 of them all over the world?

MARRIOTT: We walk the talk. We talk about this all the time, and we have a lot of programs and effort, but really we have a culture that says we think the people are our most important asset. We know it's true, we train them, we provide opportunities for our people and we're loyal to our people and in return they're loyal to us.

And that really means that they go the last mile to take care of our customers and our customers love the service that they get and they come back and we preach it, we talk about . . . we hire specifically for people who have the right attitude who are interested in service, who are interested in hospitality and we train them and teach them and give them opportunities to grow. Half of our general managers have come out of the hourly ranks and most of our senior executives started as a waiter, a security officer or something like that in the company 30-40 years ago.

RYSSDAL: Do you trace that all back to your dad?

MARRIOTT: I trace it back to the culture that he and my mother established. They established a culture that said, you know, that people are very, very important. My dad put in the first health care program in the industry back in 1935 in Washington when he hired a full-time doctor to take care of his people. And there wasn't any health care, nobody had health care in the '30s, and this was the depression and everybody . . . nobody had any money, nobody had any money to pay for doctors. The people that worked for the Hot Shoppe restaurants back then were, you know, there were normal paid wages in that industry was where very low at the time and they couldn't afford healthcare so he hired a doctor, put him on the payroll and everybody went to see this doctor.

RYSSDAL: How do you do that now, though? You've talked about actually controlling the Marriott Corporation's health care expenses. Bringing them down, in fact. How do you do that?

MARRIOTT: Everybody's trying to bring them down. You do it by . . .

RYSSDAL: So how are you doing it?

MARRIOTT: What we're trying to do is get our people to live a healthy lifestyle and we have . . . we really promote hard the fact that they should take care of their own health; manage their own health as best they can, watch their weight. We put a no smoking policy in our hotels and we, you know, when other chains started it before we did . . . but they're a small chain and we put it in about 2400 hotels, no smoking. And that's part of our "live healthy" program.

RYSSDAL: You joined the company in 1956, you were 24 years old and bang you're a vice-president in this lodging corporation. How did that feel?

MARRIOTT: Well, I joined the company really four years before that. Six years before that I worked in a Hot Shoppe in Salt Lake City all through my college years and that's where I went to school at the University of Utah and I did everything in the kitchen, I cooked and I worked the fountain and I washed dishes and I mopped floors and I did everything in the kitchen that there was to do and I did it for four years. When I came to Washington, I worked in our test kitchen downstairs to make sure that we were getting the right kind of food. I was in charge of service in our restaurants then. They put me in charge of service and I worked on that.

But along came 1957 and we opened our first hotel. And, you know, I'd been around the business all my life so I knew the business pretty well, and the first hotel was struggling it was basically running empty, and I said to my dad one day I'd like to run that hotel. And he said well, you don't know anything about the hotel business, and I said I know I don't, but neither do you. So I said give me a crack and let me see what I can do. So he gave it to me and I took over the first hotel and we worked very hard and we got the occupancy up and the profits up and then we built the second hotel and then the third and the fourth and . . .

RYSSDAL: Tell me about the first day on the job in that first hotel.

MARRIOTT: Well, the first day on the job in the hotel we were running about 10 or 15 percent occupancy and I tried to figure out what we needed to do to begin to bring business into the hotel, and I soon discovered after three or four weeks on the job that we needed to do more than just cater to highway travelers because that's what we built the hotel for.

We built the hotel right at the time Eisenhower signed up on the new interstate highway program and so we said okay, we're going to build this hotel for the automobile. Our restaurants had thrived because of the automobile. We had the first drive-in restaurants east of the Mississippi. We made a lot of money on drive-in restaurants because we catered to people in automobiles. We thought that the same thing would happen in the hotel business.

We soon discovered that after about a few months in the business that people who traveled by automobile only traveled about six months a year by car. The rest of the time it was business people coming in by plane or it was groups and conventions. So we made a major effort to try and get business people who are doing business at the Pentagon, which is right next to our original hotel to come stay at Marriott, and we did get a lot of that business, but we needed the convention and group business.

So we opened up the basement storage area and put a little meeting room in down there and we went to Richmond. And we solicited the Virginia State Associations, because our hotel was in Virginia although it was on the Potomac, a stone's throw from downtown Washington, it was in Virginia, and the Virginia State Association said we want to meet in northern Virginia. We've never had a hotel in northern Virginia that had a meeting space. We've had to go to Richmond, we've had to go to Norfolk and Charlottesville and then on down to Roanoke, but we've never been able to come to Washington and everybody wants to come to Washington.

So that was our first big market push. We added more convention meeting space and that put us over the top in terms of profitability.

RYSSDAL: Does your experience in the early days still inform your management style today?

MARRIOTT: Yeah, because I spent my time out in the units and I still spend my time out in the units. I spend at least one-third to one-half my time in the hotels trying it find out what's going on, trying to learn. All the good ideas I get come from the operations.

RYSSDAL: What do you do when you walk into a Marriott Hotel, whether it's a Fairfield Inn or, you know, a JW Marriott, top of the line?

MARRIOTT: Well, generally I try and first of all, shake hands with as many of the employees as I can shake hands with. They like to see, for some reason, have their picture taken with me. So I have my picture taken with a lot of them, and I visit with them shortly and quickly, and then I head for the kitchen. That's where I started out.

RYSSDAL: First thing you go to?

MARRIOTT: I go right to the kitchen and then I go out in the back dock to see if they've cleaned up the back dock because that's where you receive your food and where all the trash and garbage goes out, and if the back dock is clean I'm pretty sure that they're taking pretty good care of the customers, but if the back dock is a mess I say to myself this guy is not on the ball, and so I can judge an awful lot by the appearance of that back dock. It's a little bit crazy but just what . . . what habit.

RYSSDAL: Works for you. Do you look for things people are doing right?

MARRIOTT: Oh, absolutely.

RYSSDAL: Or do you look for things they're doing wrong?

MARRIOTT: I look for things they're doing right and if they're doing things where there are things they need to change I'll tell them. I'll tell them that they ought to do some . . . there's certain areas they need to clan up there's certain areas that they ought to be thinking about doing differently, and I see a lot of things that need fixing.

RYSSDAL: What's the worst thing you've ever seen?

MARRIOTT: Oh, I've seen one or two hotels that were not very clean, that were really, really dirty and I . . . I don't see those any more.

(Laughter)

Those were early on. Those were very early, and they know I'm coming so I know . . . I'm not naïve enough to know they haven't cleaned up for me, but I . . . people ask me well, how come you don't make sneak attacks and go in unannounced and I said because I can only go in one unannounced and everybody else knows I'm there, so they all scurry around, so I said maybe it's better to let them know I'm coming so they'll at least clean the place up and have it spic and span and . . . you know . . . when I'm there and maybe they'll learn how to do it and maybe they'll know that this is what's expected. That they have to do it for their customers.

RYSSDAL: What makes you angry as a CEO?

MARRIOTT: People that have a "don't care" attitude. People who seem to just not really engage in their job or engage with their people. People who don't know their people. I went into one of our hotels once and it was very obvious that the general manager did not know his people, had never been in the kitchen for a long time . . . it made me really angry when I saw that he really didn't seem to care. He was more interested in his own personal aggrandizement, you know? What am I getting out of this for me personally rather than taking care of his people, taking care of the business and managing the business in the proper way.

RYSSDAL: Is there a way for you to figure out what your name is worth, what the brand Marriott is worth?

MARRIOTT: Well, I guess the stock price is probably the best way.

RYSSDAL: Yeah, it's the easiest one, though. What's the hard way to figure it out?

MARRIOTT: Well, I don't know. The customer satisfaction. We measure customer satisfaction and we know that we continue to increase year-over-year in customer satisfaction and to be able to do that is very, very important to us because customer satisfaction drives our growth.

If we're doing a great job for the customers then we find that owners, and property owners want to develop more Marriott Hotels, because we have a higher acceptance in the marketplace than our competitors do, and we will make more money for our owners than one of our competitors would make in the same hotel and this is what attracts owners.

We're a management company, we don't own our hotels, we manage for investors and for other people and so we have to do a really great job for the customer so the customer will come back, we'll have stronger occupancies, we'll have stronger room rates than our competitors would in the same market. And that means we become first choice for owners who are developing new hotels and this funds our growth.

RYSSDAL: Marriott used to, though, be an owner of the actual properties.

MARRIOTT: That's right.

RYSSDAL: And you decided you didn't want to do that anymore. Why?

MARRIOTT: We decided we could not grow in this company to 3,000 hotels which we'll have at the end of this year, by owning all of our own hotels, and we knew that the power of the brand is in the distribution, the number of units you have and any city, state or any country; the distribution is very powerful in driving the brand and we couldn't get the distribution unless we did some franchising and we did the rest on management contracts. We had to get the distribution; we couldn't do it by leveraging our balance sheet.

RYSSDAL: So help me understand this, you don't own any of these hotels but you make your money off these hotels. How does that work?

MARRIOTT: We manage them for others, we get a percentage of sales, and we get a percentage of the profit after a return to the owner.

RYSSDAL: And you charge the owner fees?

MARRIOTT: Yes. We charge the owner a management fee.

RYSSDAL: Now, based on what I read, those are some pretty high fees that you charge compared to the rest of the industry?

MARRIOTT: We're charging about the same as the rest of the industry. We have to; you can't be non-competitive with what your competitors are charging.

RYSSDAL: We were out at the Dulles Airport Marriott this morning and we picked up one of these cards, I'm sure you've seen one of these customers satisfaction cards?

MARRIOTT: Uh-huh.

RYSSDAL: They ever wind up on your desk?

MARRIOTT: I see a composite of all of brands every month on customer satisfaction. How are we doing, are we . . . we have a goal, are we meeting our goal, are we exceeding it, are we falling behind and what are the areas in which we're falling behind? Is it the quality of the guest room; is it the quality of the food and service in the restaurant? Is it the overall appearance of the hotel? Is it the staff? What areas can we do better? One of the biggest problems we have is when something goes wrong in the room itself to get that corrected as soon as possible.

If the television doesn't work, if the air conditioning is faulty, if there's a problem with the plumbing or the hot water is not good, we've got to get that fixed and we've got to respond immediately and we are working very, very hard to continue to resolve these issues and problems.

RYSSDAL: You've got a half a million hotel rooms, though.

MARRIOTT: That's right.

RYSSDAL: How do you keep track of every single one?

MARRIOTT: We've got great people in every hotel and we've got a management team in the hotels that have an average of 15 and 20 years with our company. We have an average of six or seven people on what we call our executive team in the hotel the men and women who run the hotel who are in charge of food and beverage, who are in charge of housekeeping, engineering, accounting and they're running the hotels and when I go to the hotels and I'll sit around the table with this team and I'll say how many years, how many years have each one of you been . . . the average is between 15 and 20 years per person.

Well, if they've had 15 to 20 years in our company they know what's expected of them, they know the importance of the company culture, they know the importance of profitability and how to make money, they know how to satisfy the customer because they've been trained and they work the system and within the system for all these number of years.

RYSSDAL: How do you measure success? Is it only customer satisfaction? Is that what you're looking for?

MARRIOTT: That's first. Customer satisfaction and we also measure associate satisfaction. We have an associate opinion survey twice a year and we want to know are the associates engaged in the work, do they enjoy their job? Is their manager fair with them, did he treat them properly? Do they have a right of appeal, what we call guarantee of fair treatment? They can come all the way to my office if they don't feel they are treated fairly. And I get letters and I get phone calls and each letter and each phone call is answered probably not exactly by me but by somebody in the system who takes care of that particular situation.

RYSSDAL: I'm going to oversimplify here a little bit. You're trying to keep everybody happy. Employees, customers, and Bill Marriott.

MARRIOTT: That's right.

(Laughter)

And once the customers and associates are happy, then I'm happy.

RYSSDAL: Yeah.

MARRIOTT: And the owners are happy because they're making money.

RYSSDAL: Obviously we did some reading before we came out to talk to you and one of the descriptions of you is something along these lines: an iron fist in a bell hops velvet glove. What do you think of that?

MARRIOTT: Well, I totally believe in our culture and I practice what I preach as far as my concern for our people, making sure that they have everything they need to do the job. At the same time, we're a business, and today at our employee rally my son in a joking way said well, I heard that the 16th of January is the day we first entered the lodging business. Why don't we make that a national holiday for Marriott and give everybody the 16th of January off every year?

RYSSDAL: That's why he's not in charge, right?

MARRIOTT: And I came to the microphone and I said, "no." And everybody laughed, they knew that's exactly what I was going to say and that's kind of the way it works. I mean they know that this is a business, they know that we have to do what we're going to say in terms of it meeting shareholder expectations and meeting earnings expectations and we are serious about this business. We are very serious about making money for our shareholders and our owners at both hotels.

RYSSDAL: Marriott has very pointedly gone from the less expensive end of the spectrum with the Fairfield Inns and those sorts of establishments all the way up to Ritz-Carlton. You guys did that on purpose to capture every single slice of the lodging market.

MARRIOTT: Right.

RYSSDAL: Aren't you worried that maybe you're spreading yourself a bit too thin? And that you'd be better off concentrating either on the high end or the low end?

MARRIOTT: We have been very successful because what we found early on was a Marriott Hotel customer who comes in on business and pays a good rate because he charges the stay to his company is the same customer who says I'm going to take my kids to Disney World and he'll leave from Detroit and drive to Florida and stay in Fairfield Inns along the way. Or he's the same customer who ways oh, my company just transferred me from Detroit to Los Angeles. I need a place to stay while our family hunts for a home so I'll stay in the Residence Inn by Marriott because I know Marriott has quality and I know they'll take good care of me. Or I'm traveling from Detroit to Indianapolis, I'm only going to be in the hotel for eight or nine hours, I don't need a big restaurant, I don't need room service, I'm only going to be there overnight, I need a great place to sleep, I don't want to pay a lot of money for it so I'll stay in a Courtyard but I'm going to take my wife on a three-day vacation or a four-day vacation to South Beach and I'll stay in the Ritz-Carlton. The same customer.

RYSSDAL: Yeah. So you're trying to be everything to everybody.

MARRIOTT: We're trying to meet the needs of the traveling customer from a price standpoint, from a quality standpoint and he has his family and he is traveling on the road and he wants to stay in a Fairfield Inn we're there for him. If he wants to take his wife on a four or five day second honeymoon to a great hotel we're there for him in South Beach at the Ritz-Carlton.

RYSSDAL: I bet if you walked to Downtown Washington and asked people if they knew that Marriott owned Ritz-Carlton they'd say no, really?

MARRIOTT: They don't know it.

RYSSDAL: Does that bother you at all?

MARRIOTT: No, that's what we want. We don't want them to know it.

RYSSDAL: Why is that?

MARRIOTT: Because we believe Ritz-Carlton is a strong enough brand on its own, it does not need the Marriott umbrella. We want Ritz-Carlton customers to be Ritz-Carlton customers. We also want them to be Marriott customers. A lot of them who stay in Ritz-Carlton know that Marriott owns it, but at the same time we have a distance between the brands that's very important. The Ritz-Carlton headquarters is not in this building, in our corporate building, it's downtown on . . . in downtown Chevy Chase.

RYSSDAL: Where's the room for growth in your business?

MARRIOTT: Well, the biggest room for growth is international and we are pushing very hard in many international markets. China is very important to us. We're over 30 hotels in China with another 16 under construction in the pipeline. We have a pipeline overall of about 85,000 rooms which will take place in the next two to three years.

RYSSDAL: Sounds like a staggering amount.

MARRIOTT: It's a lot of rooms. But you've got 510,000 right now, so it grows.

RYSSDAL: Yeah.

MARRIOTT: And we're going very strong in India, we're probably -we have seven or eight hotels in there now; we'll probably add another eight hotels in India. We're doing a lot in Europe; we're opening a Ritz-Carlton in Moscow this summer. We've got two beautiful new hotels in Berlin we opened a couple of years ago, a Ritz-Carlton and a JW Marriott.

We're doing a lot in England. We're the largest operator in England of hotels today and so, you know . . . we're very strong in the Middle East. We're building more and more hotels in the Middle East; we've got a lot of Ritz-Carltons going up over there, a lot of Marriotts, a lot of Renaissance Hotels going up in the Middle East.

RYSSDAL: Marriott has, in the last couple of years, started overhauling a lot of its hotels, installing wireless Internet in different gathering places, in the lobby instead of meeting rooms and those sorts of things. Are you still comfortable in some of your hotels that have gone a little bit more modern?

MARRIOTT: Oh, sure. I mean the customer today wants a great bed, a flat-screen TV, connectivity with the Internet and with their e-mails; they want a good restaurant, they want a great bar, and if they're there for a meeting they want fabulous convention space.

They want wireless lobbies and we're putting connectivity panels in our new flat screens so they can plug in and use their DVD player to play the movies they brought with them. They can use their iPod in our TV and use the sound system from the TV. It's a connectivity panel; it connects all the gadgets that they bring with them that they want to use through the screen.

RYSSDAL: You won't take this the wrong way, I hope, but it's not every 75-year-old CEO who can talk the talk like that.

MARRIOTT: Well. Don't ask me to hook one up for you.

(Laughter)

RYSSDAL: Who works for you? What kind of people do you have coming to work here?

MARRIOTT: Are you talking about direct reports or are you talking about . . .

RYSSDAL: No, no, no. I'm talking about the service staff employees of Marriott. I mean, who are they? Are they lower income looking for a way up? Are they immigrants? Are they college kids? I mean who is it that applies to Marriott for a job?

MARRIOTT: We have a tremendous number of people from foreign countries. We have probably if you did a detailed analysis upwards of 50 different nations working in our various hotels. We've got people from Mongolia working in Minneapolis; we've got Chinese working in Boston and of course we've got Haitians in Florida. We've got people from Mexico working in Texas and Arizona. We've got a lot of Jamaicans working. We can't get labor in this country; we have to import labor from Jamaica into Palm Springs six months a year and then they go back because we can't find people to work in our hotels in this country.

RYSSDAL: What's your opinion, then, of Congress and its actions on immigration?

MARRIOTT: I think that American . . . that people that come to this country ought to have an opportunity to live the American dream. We're all immigrants . . . everybody in this country except for the Native Americans . . . are immigrants. And we all came here, our ancestors came over here with nothing and they made a living and lived the American dream.

My great-grandparents came over to this country as immigrants, crossed the plains with the Mormon pioneers back in 1850, arrived in Utah penniless and made a life for themselves and were able to pass on their values to my parents and they passed them on to me. And this is . . . only in America can this kind of thing happen.

RYSSDAL: We opened up our Web site, actually, to some listener questions and a surprising number of them inquired about your Mormon faith and membership in the LDS church and whether that effects how you do business.

MARRIOTT: It does. I think I've served as a bishop in our church and as a bishop I was like a parish priest. I had 800 members of my unit that I had to take care of. A great number of them were Hispanic, a great number of them were single, young single adults. And you know I listened to their problems, I dealt with teenage problems, and I dealt with people who had marriage problems. In our church we tithe, we pay 10 percent of our income to the church and little Hispanic ladies would come into me on Sunday and pay me weekly their tithing, $2, $3. I learned from them what it's like to live in tough, difficult circumstances. I developed an empathy for people that I deal with in our company who have the same kinds of problems. This empathy came from what I learned in my church.

RYSSDAL: You've said, or it has been written that you've said, that the CEO of a company, in order to be successful, the employees have to believe that the CEO believes in something other than profit.

MARRIOTT: That's right.

RYSSDAL: What is that for you?

MARRIOTT: The dignity of the individual, respect for the individual. We have a hotel where a man came in from a foreign country, was working in the dish room, the lady in charge of the kitchen did not know his name so she called him sir. Nobody had ever called him sir in his life and he responded to that so well, became such a great employee because he was called sir, he was shown respect, and I think it's respect that we have for our people at all levels of the company that sets us apart from other companies.

RYSSDAL: Want to circle back to something I touched on before and just finish that train of thought. We talked a little bit about Marriott being a manager of the hotels, not really an owner. You have to, then, when you try to upgrade your hotels or modernize them or change anything, you have to sell that vision that you have to 1,000 or 1200 hotel owners. It has to be enormously complicated just from a management perspective.

MARRIOTT: It's very complicated.

RYSSDAL: How do you make that work?

MARRIOTT: First of all, we have to define the benefits. We have to tell them here's what the competitors are doing, here's what we think we should do to become more efficient, more modern, more accepted in the eyes of our customers. Have a product for our customers that's equal to or better than our competitors. We need to continue to refresh and rebuild our product. If you get out there with a stale product and you keep it stale you're going to go stale and you're going to end up going down in a bad spiral downward to the point where your hotel is going to become very non-competitive and you're going to lose a lot of money. RYSSDAL: Do the interests of Marriott always line up with the interests of the hotel owners?

MARRIOTT: Not always. Lots of times they are hesitant to reinvest. I think in the last two years since they've been making really good money they've been more prone to reinvest and as they've seen the competitors reinvest that's got their attention. We continue to compare ourselves with our competitors in each and every market. We know what our competitor is doing and we know what we're doing in terms of occupancy and average room rate and we show them that we are here and we need to move to . . . from A to B and we can't get to B without their putting money into the hotel and they've been reasonably responsive. They've been more responsive the last two years than they were right after 9/11 when everybody was scared to death and just pulled back and was afraid to reinvest.

RYSSDAL: Now that we're past that and people seem to be traveling and traveling again and the lodging business is picking up what's the biggest thing in the way of Marriott continuing to grow, continuing to add those 85,000 rooms?

MARRIOTT: Well, we have to look for places where we don't have hotels. In other words, we can put different groups . . . we can use our brand strength to expand different brands into the same market but we've got to be sure that we don't cannibalize our Marriott customers with more Marriott product in the market than we should have there.

RYSSDAL: Your son John had been expected to take over at some point. He left the company, though, recently. What's going to happen to Marriott when there's not a Marriott in charge?

MARRIOTT: Well, we've got a lot of bench strength and we've got some very strong senior executives and I've got, you know, a son in the company now, David, who's down the line who is much younger and it will be a while before he gets into the senior, senior management of the company, but he's doing very, very well.

But this company can run well without a Marriott. It would be nice to have a Marriott some day, but I would think that the company can . . . the culture of this company is very strong. It would be very, very . . . and anybody who takes over after me has got to recognize and embrace that culture. The board knows that, the board is very involved in our succession plan and they understand the values that we've created for this company and want to continue those values and they're going to put the person in who they think will best do that.

RYSSDAL: Was it sad for you when John came to you and said Dad I want to do something else?

MARRIOTT: Yeah, I was disappointed. I think it was disappointing to him. It was disappointing to both of us. We'd worked for a long time together to try and get him to where he wanted . . . could run this company and it . . . he's more entrepreneurial oriented, he . . . there's a lot of bureaucracy that goes with any company this size and there's nothing . . . you know, we fight it all the time, but we can't totally fix it and he was frustrated with too many meetings and not being able to be out in the units and not doing deals, he loves to do deals, and so we said hey, let's go . . . why don't you go do deals and be happy?

RYSSDAL: Are you a guy who cuts through bureaucracy, who reaches . . .

MARRIOTT: I go all the way down. I call the general manager of a hotel if I find something I don't like and I call the various staff departments around here and I'm sure that a lot of people in the company are scratching their heads but they're getting used to it after 50 years, so . . .

RYSSDAL: Well, and you expect it; you can probably get away with it but do you think that engenders other people doing it?

MARRIOTT: I don't know. I don't know how to even respond to that. I tell you I do it and I hope other people do it, too. Because what we want to do in this company is solve problems.

RYSSDAL: Did your dad do it to you?

MARRIOTT: Oh, absolutely.

RYSSDAL: How did you feel about that?

MARRIOTT: I accepted it, and knew that I wasn't going to be able to fix it so I didn't worry about it.

(Laughter)

RYSSDAL: You're almost 75-years-old. There's nothing really left for you to accomplish in life except making this company better. What gets you out of bed in the morning?

MARRIOTT: I love the business. This is a great business; this is an exciting business. I mean you're working with great people, you're working with great products, it's a great thrill to go into a new hotel and see the things we've put in and see them work. Or go into an old hotel that's been refurbished and see that what we've been able to do and what we've been able to fix. This is an avocation and a vocation for me.

RYSSDAL: If you're traveling as much as you clearly are, though, if you're at 300 (I read some place) hotels a year, what do you do to unwind and relax?

MARRIOTT: I read a little bit, you know? And . . .

RYSSDAL: Do you think you're a workaholic?

MARRIOTT: Oh, absolutely.

RYSSDAL: And you're all right with that?

MARRIOTT: Oh, yeah.

RYSSDAL: And your wife, too?

MARRIOTT: Yeah, she . . . she doesn't want me home for lunch.

(Laughter)

RYSSDAL: Other than keeping going and making this hotel better, what is it about the lodging business that's going to prevent you from where you want to be?

MARRIOTT: Well, the thing that could damage everybody in the lodging business would be a terrorist incident here in the United States like 9/11, another one. And that's the thing that continues to concern us all, is are we going to have another incident and what's it going to be like? Or are we going to have a series of incidents and that's when I think all of us are raising our hands and saying we need to continue to protect this nation as best we can to do everything we can to protect our country and our people because tourism is pretty fragile but it's been amazing to see how people responded after 9/11.

It didn't take long for people to say they're not going to drive me into the basement; I'm going to get out and travel; I'm going to get out and do what I've normally done; I'm going to live a normal life. I'm not going to let the terrorists keep me home.

That worries me, I think if Avian flu ever breaks out in this country that's a big problem. We saw it happen with SARS in Hong Kong and in Canada where we have big operations and we knew, we know it would happen here, but Avian flu . . . hopefully they'll be able to get some vaccine that will be able to prevent it. Or cure it.

RYSSDAL: So it's things that are outside your control?

MARRIOTT: Things outside our control. The economy, if the economy goes south; I don't think it's going to. I think the price of oil coming down in the last month or two has been fantastic for the country. It slows down inflation, it gives everybody more money to spend, you're not spending so much at the pump, you're not spending so much for your heating oil at home and it's putting money in customers pockets and that's where you're going to see this economy really start to move ahead as a result strictly of the oil drop.

RYSSDAL: You are at this company experimenting with something that I think is called "the reinvention of the lodging experience." It's based on what I've read new music, new lighting, aromatherapy. Describe a night in a Marriott Hotel for me ten years from now.

MARRIOTT: Well, a lot of this change that we're embracing is taking place in the lobby. If you look around lobbies today, the old lobby people would just sit in the lobby waiting for somebody to come off the elevator to go to dinner. Or to have a meeting or something.

Today . . . in the future in the lobbies there's going to be food served, there's going to be drinks served, there's going to be people over in the corner working on their computer, getting their e-mail, there's going to be people meeting and having a little meeting in one corner.

So the lobbies are going to become places of activity, places where people are going to dine together, drink together; meet together, work together and where people are going to be by themselves working. But there's an aura of activity and action taking place in lobbies, which have traditionally been pretty dead places. So the restaurant is going to become part of the lobby, the bar is going to become part of the lobby and it's all going to interconnect in what we call a great room.

RYSSDAL: This is kind of a radio thing, but I've noticed as we've been talking that as you've been describing things in your hotel you close your eyes. Do you see it when you talk about it?

MARRIOTT: Yeah, I do. Because I've been studying what we're going to do and I do see it.

RYSSDAL: Did I hear right that you have a blog you're writing, a Web log now?

MARRIOTT: Yeah! I'm a blogger! How about that?

(Laughter)

RYSSDAL: "I'm a blogger."

MARRIOTT: A 75-year-old blogger.

RYSSDAL: What do you say?

MARRIOTT: Oh, I'm going to talk about . . . I was talking about the history of the company, I talk about some of my observations about the industry. I've only done one, but as we look forward on some of them, I'm going to talk about some of the issues facing our industry in terms of the government regulation and in terms of government concerns. I will talk a lot about my personal observations of the economy, of our business, of our products, of our customers. If a customer has a problem and I think I want to address it, I'll talk about it.

RYSSDAL: All right, perfect. Bill Marriott is the chairman and CEO and the son of the founder of the company of the same name. Mr. Marriott thanks a lot for your time.

MARRIOTT: Thank you; any time.

[NOTE: The text above is an extended excerpt of the interview and may have been edited. It should not be taken as a verbatim record.]

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