By Jack Cumming
My wife and I live in a CCRC, but we also like to cruise. For several years, we’ve preferred Princess Cruise lines because of the onboard experience. Before that, we cruised on Royal Caribbean, but it became more corporate than personal. We shifted to Celebrity, but it, too, began to view cruisers more as cargo than as valued customers. That’s when we discovered Princess.
Corporate Shenanigans
The common theme here is that enterprises and brands reflect the attitudes of their leaders and that can change over time. A startup needs customers to get past the friends and family investment round. Entrepreneurs never forget their first customer, and they are always grateful for every customer. That’s different from the idea that customer acquisition is the responsibility of the marketing department.
As businesses become established, ego and control often evince themselves among the hierarchy of authority. Some people are very skilled at advancing themselves within a hierarchy through adroit use of personality. Advancing by personality is different from building a business.
Some ambitious employees are very good at “social skills.” We might call that making yourself attractive to higher-ups even if that is at the expense of those lower down. Others are good at “business chess,” in which ambitious climbers seek to stand out by taking on the most visible tasks at which they know they can succeed.
Few are those who reach the top after tackling the toughest challenges for which their performance may be criticized. And then there are those with plausible credentials who simply stay the course with survival skills slated to avoid their being noticed or their inadequacies observed. True talent, or the absence of it, often first becomes manifest in the top position, and even then, boards are reluctant to make changes as needed.
Customer Experience
That’s the corporate evolution side of business, but more important is the customer experience side. Picture this on a cruise ship. It might also be senior living. A couple come for breakfast in a special area just for suite guests. The same room is to be used later for a “Tuscan lunch,” and roughly half a dozen waitstaff are at work setting the lunch table overseen by uniformed officers.
Our newly arrived customers sit waiting unseen, watching the bustle of the staff, for 20 minutes when, finally, a waiter with water fills their glasses. Still no coffee, at 8:45 a.m., and it’s breakfast time. It can be disconcerting, even infuriating, to watch wait staff preparing for future customers while you as a present customer are totally neglected. This is, of course, a true story, and it may be an indication that Princess, too, is going corporate and succumbing to the Carnival Corporation culture.
Going Corporate
Evidence of a culture going corporate, in my experience, occurs when the focus shifts from the customer, who is there in front of you, to the abstract business school notions of mission, vision, values, and strategic plans. All of those abstractions are valuable, but they should be implicit in the focus on that customer who is sitting there waiting to be served.
It’s easy to deduce a business lesson from this breakfast anecdote. As it turns out, the breakfast manager has no say in performance. The higher hierarchical authority has given priority to the Tuscan lunch. Staff are taken from the breakfast service, and additional staff are brought from dining. Hence, the bustle of lunch setup as breakfast customers languish and wait. Hierarchy, too, is a part of business school corporate culture.
Human Beats Corporate
Such “not-my-job” thinking is not tolerated in normal human interactions. Think of a conversation with a friend or stranger. We would never pretend to be conversing with someone, while actually ignoring them and working instead on a hobby, but that happens in business, especially in this hospitality side of business, all the time. Thus, it happens that businesses thrive, think Amazon, and then turn corporate, lose customer enthusiasm, and finally sink into the last stages of business maturation, decay, irrelevance, and demise.
Looking at Princess Cruises, the brand by my analysis thrived even within the Carnival Corporate structure, because a special CEO, Jan Swartz, was at the helm. She intuitively had this human understanding, and Princess thrived even as it was unfairly singled out during the pandemic. With her open heart and engaging intelligence, she skillfully brought the Princess brand through a tough time for the cruise industry.
Leadership Dilution
With time, she was advanced to oversight of both the Princess and Holland America brands, and then to a corporate post in strategic operations. In the meantime, the complexity of onboard offerings has escalated under Princess’s new leadership. As our breakfast anecdote illustrates, shoreside bright ideas have exceeded the capacity of the onboard crew to maintain the quality of the customer experience.
Moreover, as the digital experience becomes increasingly central to intelligent enterprise management, Princess is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to Miami. That may align with corporate executive ambitions to be more visible to the top officers like Christine Duffy, but it is unlikely to help Princess, or Carnival for that matter, respond with the needed alacrity to the rising challenges of digital insight and deployment.
Finding Talent
As an aside, without my having any inside knowledge, I would note that attracting Jan Swartz to leave the cruising industry to take the helm of an emerging, nationally branded senior living corporation could be a genius move. When corporate offices are moved for token rationales, there is often an opportunity for others to grab the top talent.
This is not a trivial suggestion. There is a big opportunity in senior living for an organization like Acts Retirement-Life Communities, the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society, or another well-established brand to become nationwide. Cruise lines are not only nationally branded but internationally as well.
Brookdale, of course, might have become the trusted national brand, but that opportunity was lost. Starting with a customer focus, as is the case with the best of the not-for-profits, can create the industry for the future.
A talented leader like Ms. Swartz is needed to have the vision and to bring it to reality. We can add that such people aren’t attracted by the usual perquisites but instead are drawn by the opportunity to improve the lives of people by taking on a challenge. Creating a national brand can give senior living the credibility needed to be the trusted home for aging.
When all is said and done, it’s all about people. People includes customers and prospective customers in the first instance; competent staff, since happy employees make happy customers; executives without ego who have understanding beyond the jejune; and talented leadership at the top to make it all hum with well-oiled precision.
You’ve expressed this so well. One of the best activity directors I worked with came from the cruise industry. She later became a community executive director and had incredible people skills.
I want to know if you ever got your coffee and was it any good!
Hi, Anne, as it turns out the coffee on board is mostly first-rate these days, though I’m not crazy about the coffee in the buffet.
Yes, we did get coffee. truth is that without coffee, I’m a nasty, clawing bear. I believe in self-service. My wife wanted to be patient and wait for service, so we stayed in that dining venue, but I got up and was going to go the International Cafe to bring back coffee.
On my way, I passed the maitre d’ who asked what if I were leaving. I told him what I was about, and then he jumped into action. There was one waiter serving those “guests” who were eating supervised by that nonworking maitre d’. Suddenly he got it, and he began pitching in to help the one waiter.
That was how I got the story of how the dining manager responsible for the Tuscan Lunch simply used a power move to get his lunch set up at the expense of those who came for breakfast. Once an organization starts having siloes instead of an all-hands culture, it’s gone corporate and customers had best move on.