The $11-billion hotel chain reflects its founding family's values, says Fortune's Marc Gunther.
In 1927, J. Willard Marriott and new bride, Alice, opened a nine-stool root beer stand in Washington, D.C. It grew into a restaurant chain called Hot Shoppes and much later became a hotel company. Their son Bill Marriott worked in the kitchen as a young man.
Last week, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the $11.5-billion-year Marriott Corp, Bill Marriott returned to the kitchen - this time as a volunteer, to prepare food for Washington's poor people at a nonprofit called the DC Central Kitchen. He was joined by about 25 Marriott employees. (You can watch Bill Marriott in a corporate video of the event on YouTube.)
It was a fitting way to mark Marriott's anniversary, not just because it echoed the company's humble beginnings, but because it reflects a corporate culture built on an ethic of service.
Elsewhere, thousands of the 150,000 Marriott employees volunteered on company time as part of the company's "Spirit to Serve" day. They cleaned up the city's largest park in Atlanta, built homes with Habitat for Humanity in Thailand and walked to benefit hungry children in Dubai.
In a car on his way to the event in downtown Washington, Bill Marriott - his full name is J. Willard Marriott II - told me that his parents taught him to put the employees of the company first.
"If the employees are well taken care of, they'll take care of the customer and the customer will come back," he said. "That's basically the core value of the company."
Of course, many companies say that employees are their most important asset. But Marriott Corp. acts that way, too.
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Source - CNN
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