2016 GLOBAL ALUMNI SUMMIT
The importance of company mojo
The second day of the summit opened with one of the most eagerly anticipated presentations of the weekend. Chip Conley, Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, gave a phenomenal keynote speech on how great companies get their mojo.
Fifteen years ago, Chip Conley, veteran hotelier and former CEO of Joie de Vivre( a company USA Today called“ the most delightfully schizophrenic collection of hotels in America”), was having a bad day, or more accurately, a bad year.
At the time, the San Francisco Bay Area tech bubble had gone bust in a big way. The subsequent economic downturn hit the hotel industry particularly hard, forcing many hotels into bankruptcy and foreclosure. Conley and Joie de Vivre, both renowned successes prior to the burst of the tech bubble, began to struggle; Conley and his executive team weren’ t sure if their hotels were going to survive.
Seeking some literary inspiration on a bleak weekday afternoon, Conley made a trip to a San Francisco bookstore. He walked away, however, with much more than just a book.
In the bookstore’ s psychology section, Conley came across Abraham Maslow’ s Toward a Psychology of Being, which outlines the classic theory of the Hierarchy of Needs. For Conley, the theory planted the seeds for an idea that he would eventually use as a framework to develop organizational strategies that would change his own company and countless others. He later wrote about the framework and its application in his critically acclaimed book, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.
This experience was just one of the many topics Conley discussed as keynote speaker at the Global Alumni Summit in San Francisco this past June. Now the Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, Conley described to a rapt audience of alumni how his Maslow-inspired framework changed the way Joie de Vivre approached its relationships with employees, customers, and investors. In many ways, the company defied the odds, tripling in size despite the economic downturn, and the boutique hotel company has only continued to grow in the years since.
Until Conley wrote about it in his book, the hierarchy of needs was not a theory necessarily associated with strategy and marketing( although in his research for the book, Conley found that other companies had directly and indirectly incorporated the theory in their business approaches). The theory itself is visualized as a pyramid with five levels, with each level representing human needs, from the most basic( food and security) at the base, to the highest level( self-actualization, or fulfilling one’ s full potential) at the apex.
In a nutshell, the theory states that an individual must first meet the most“ basic level of needs” before focusing on higher level needs. In other words, without the ability to meet needs like food and shelter, people will struggle to answer higher needs like building relationships and fulfilling career potential.
In his article“ Maslow’ s Hierarchy of Needs,” Saul McLeod, a psychologist at the University of Manchester, writes on why we often fluctuate between these levels.“ Every person is capable and has the desire to move up the hierarchy toward a level of self-actualization,” McLeod says.“ Unfortunately, progress is often disrupted by failure to meet lower level needs. Life experiences, including divorce and loss of job may cause an individual to fluctuate between levels of the hierarchy.”
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