Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

by Stanley McChrystal

The Ritz-Carlton hotel chain has spent a century building a reputation for quality, luxury, and reliability. Through recessions, depressions, corporate mergers, and world wars, the brand—originally a restaurant operated on high-end cruise ships, then a hotel that earned founder César Ritz the sobriquet “king of hoteliers and hotelier to kings”—has remained at the top of the food chain. Today, the company operates eighty-five hotels in thirty countries and regularly tops the Zagat lists for its hotels and dining. In particular, it has earned a reputation for offering outstanding service. It is César Ritz who is credited with the line, now a universal law in the hospitality industry, that “the customer is always right.” Nearly fifty thousand executives from other companies have traveled to the Ritz-Carlton Learning Institute and Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center to learn how they too can achieve such quality of service.