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By the mid-1970s, I felt it was time to reach for something much greater, and make Four Seasons the world's best hotel company.

Unfortunately, that decision was not taken seriously by most of my staff. I couldn't blame them. We had just one hotel abroad and only four that were not up for sale in Canada, where our name was far from being a household word. We'd be competing with world-famous companies, each with hundreds of hotels, and here I was saying that ours were going to be the best. No wonder they laughed behind my back.

I knew how it looked to them. But to me it made perfect sense. Because the hotels we'd beaten in London were among the world's best, the logic was clear: If we were going to specialize and operate only one class of hotel, we should surely be better than companies that didn't.

The key would be service.

I turned to McDonald's for some lessons in service. Through quick, pleasant servings of French fries and hamburgers, always made to specifications, thus always meeting expectations, McDonald's had become the world's biggest success in the fast-food business. They didn't just sell hamburgers; they sold value.

I called my friend George Cohon, president of McDonald's Restaurants of Canada, and asked if I could sit for a day with his new hires undergoing orientation. I wanted to see how they integrated their service component.

He agreed, and I spent a day at his training school watching their films and listening to their lectures. But what intrigued me most was the difference between their training and their advertising.

Almost every month, McDonald's changed its TV advertising, but the film they were showing new entries must have been at least fifteen years old. It struck me then that when you have something people can identify with, you don't have to keep reinventing it; once it's rooted, it sticks. Our service problem, though much more complex than McDonald's, could nevertheless adhere to that pattern.

The next day, I told our senior headquarters people, “I want you to come with me to McDonald's and see how they train people for service.”

So they came, looked, and listened, then laughed and joked about it. As one of them said, “Look, they're selling hamburgers and we're selling filet mignon. How can you even compare it?”

“I know what we're selling,” I said. “I'm talking about how we sell it.

“Quality doesn't necessarily mean luxury. It means giving customers what they expect, meeting customers' expectations every time. That's performance, value.”

I didn't go into it further then; this group and I didn't think alike. But at our next weekly meeting, I said, “I have a thought I'd like to pursue. In order to manage our employees so they give our customers personalized service, we should be treating employees the way we expect them to treat our customers. Treat them with the same understanding we want them to give our guests.” And I came up with an expression that embodied what I meant, something I had heard, I don't know where: “We are only what we do, not what we say we are.”

For years I endeavored to create within the company a climate conducive to top-grade service, an attitude and atmosphere that would give junior employees some stimulus to act on their own, become self-reliant, self-motivated, and self-controlled. Some hotels were improving, especially those run by the new young managers we had brought in, but certainly not all. And even one lagging hotel would tarnish our reputation.

I had no illusions about all that would have to be changed. Commanders who believed that bosses are made to give orders would have to learn to advise and support employees who act on their own. Autocrats who depended on position for authority would need to earn the personal authority of respect. Number crunchers would have to consider feelings as well as facts. And although we made some headway on all this, we still had a long way to go.

In every area, we pushed responsibility downward, from our corporate office to our GMs to department heads to our front line, the hourly employees to whom we gave authority to make most decisions they felt were needed to satisfy guests.

Simultaneously, I became an evangelist, preaching the gospel of service every hour of every day on every trip to every hotel, continuously restating it, clarifying it, developing it. My job was getting employees at every level to focus on one priority: pleasing customers. And it was also getting managers to focus on the obvious corollary: pleasing employees.

We treated these front-line people as members of an elite team. We set challenging goals. I didn't want a complacent “good enough” attitude creeping in. So we ordered them to aim high: zero mistakes. Not that we didn't expect mistakes to continue for quite some time, but our aim had to be perfection, or we couldn't keep getting better. We'd either keep getting better or fall behind.

It took most of the first half of the 1980s to clear out all the obstacles that stood in the way of improving service: to part ways with every executive who believed my “kooky” credo should be confined to the PR department, to part ways with every executive whose actions contradicted policy and sabotaged our credibility.

I had to make cuts at the very top: hotel general managers and head office senior executives. Some were competent technically, but we protected our values above all else. If we didn't define values positively – encouraging pride and satisfaction in work – employees would define them negatively: sloppy work, absenteeism, goofing off. What we believe about people, positive or negative, is self-fulfilling, and it's fundamental to workforce attitude and motivation.

Enforcing our credo was the most far-reaching decision I ever made, a painful process, often personally distressing. It's perhaps the hardest thing I ever did. But the fastest way for management to destroy its credibility is to say employees come first and be seen putting them last. Better to not profess any values than to not live up to them.

It took five or six years of operating by the Golden Rule, but eventually a new type of manager evolved: a communicator, not a commander; a coach, not a cop. Our leaders showed their concern for employees by involving them in decision making, which polls said eight out of ten employees wanted. They set up career paths; they were up-front and supportive. An old Japanese proverb put our managers' role in a nutshell: “If they work for you, you work for them.”

From: Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy by Isadore Sharp. Copyright © Four Seasons Hotels Limited 2009. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Group (Canada).