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Leadership Council Agenda
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Next Leadership Council Meeting:
Monday, February 6, 2012
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.
The Chandler Building
Marketing Center
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Chairman's Leadership Remarks
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 LEADERSHIP COUNCIL REMARKS
H. C. BISSELL
January 9, 2012
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Ned, thank you very much and thank all of you for being here this morning.
As you can see the way we start the New Year is with Ned showing you our ad.
It is a little bit different than what you are seeing in the balance of the media. This morning when I picked up the Wall Street Journal the headlines on the front page of Section 3 has to do with pessimism reigning as we come into 2012. As you will remember, the first day of January this year was a Sunday and what did I wake up to on Sunday morning but the New York Times and the crying New Year’s baby face staring at me.
This is the front page of the Business Section of the New York Times. Let me get each of you to try to think if you could come up with a cartoon that was worse than this as far as an opener. Margaret made me behave on New Year’s Eve so I did not have any fuzz or anything else in my brain, but this is the first baby of the year with the 2012 honor and it is a crying baby. We are already quoting, “I just got here but I know trouble when I see it.” Look at the bottom where it tells you about six economists and what we have to confront for the year.
The first thing you must do which you probably have never thought about and even though I am an economics major I have never done it, but you need to figure out what an economist is. What value add does an economist contribute to the daily lives of all of us? An economist is at best an academic, has never had a callous on his or her hand and pontificates most of the time on things that totally never come to pass or are wrong. Now we have the six experts that are going to tell you what we have to confront in 2012. As we look at them and they are from all over the lot, the first from Harvard informing us that we need to know from Bernanke as to how long he is going to keep rates low. The second is from UCal Berkley advising us the big thing we need to confront is the deficit and unemployment. From George Mason University we are being asked when is Europe going to get out of its woes? Cornell states that we need to do something about the Toil Index. Do you know what the Toil Index is? It is interesting as I have never heard of it before. The Toil Index is how many hours the average American works to stay in a median priced single family home. In 1970, it was 41 hours per month and now it is well over 100 hours per month which is why we have gone to two people in a family working because one wage earner cannot make it work. From Yale University they tell us we need a tax credit on housing which really was off the wall in terms of its type.
I only had one economist I liked and it is the gentleman from the University of Chicago. He said he will not pontificate to you, but he will deal with something that he can make happen. He said if you want my issue that we have to confront, it is health care but we can start with me as I plan to have more stand up meetings, I plan to get more in the way of exercise, I plan to have more walk here, walk there, do this and do that and I want to take action as an individual to make things better in 2012 rather than pontificate. I think this is where we are. It is where we all have to be. We are forbidden in this meeting to have anything to do with dogs in our goals, but dogs in goals mean a lot in terms of the goal I had set for myself two years ago which was to have a well-trained Dalmatian. If you don’t have a well-trained Dalmatian, you get what you tolerate. If you will tolerate pessimism, you will get garbage for this year. We need to not tolerate anything negative. Many of you have heard me say that we don’t say in our household “stamp out negative energy” but we say “stomp out negative energy”. Negative people are not fun to be around so we have to constantly be thinking about falling forward. We have a long way to go and we are in our beginnings as to what we are going to do here and what we are going to do here for our customers. We want to hear what they want and then we want to deliver.
Dana and I had lunch on Friday and we started to talk about 2012 and I told her if we could get to the point that I haven’t gotten to where if on a Wednesday evening I am talking to somebody who has heard about the Dana Rader Golf School and they say something to me that would allow an entre for the Golf School and then I wait for three weeks before I tell Dana that I met a man a few weeks ago that was interested in golf that is wrong!! That conversation should have been noted by me and I should have made a call that afternoon, that night or at the latest the next morning to tell Dana about the conversation. This type of thing is all across the disciplines. How many of you have heard that your customer is everybody else’s customer and we have to know that and we have to hammer that into our heads?
We will have another full page ad next year that will really knock the socks off of people. The fact that we had 135,000 hotel rooms occupied and we still have more than that in a year – a lot more than that. I think if you do the math on all of our hotels, you will find that it is about a 62% occupancy. Are you happy with a 62% occupancy as a GM? I don’t think so. This is just off the top of my head but if that is true and even if it is not, if we had 136,000 rooms that we could have had people sleep in, we still have to go forward to hit that.
We have to have fun this year and we have to push ourselves in a positive fashion. I think everybody is really working hard and doing well but what are the tweaks? Where is and what is at the top of the pyramid? What is our Slight Edge and what is your Slight Edge and how are we going to implement it? We are going to implement it in ways that we have never thought of before. Remember we have a long way to go as to where we want to end up with this 535-acre community.
I thank you again for 2011 and I will show you later in the presentation of my goals what the New Year’s baby of 2012 should look like.
Again, thank you very much.
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Chairman's Leadership Remarks Archive
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