3: Reinvigorating Culture

We try to make business scientific by measuring everything. But to paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson, humans make things go nonlinear. We don't always make sense. Enter Chip Conley, one of the best sense-makers in today's business world. Chip and Neil have a lot in common. And Chip has recognized nonlinearity as vital to building successful company cultures and communities. While human nonlinearity undoubtedly caused many of today's global challenges, people also have the capacity to work things out, to find a way, to collaborate toward a common goal.

Chip founded Joie de Vivre Hotels (JDV), was a strategic advisor and mentor at AirBNB, and his newest venture is Modern Elder Academy (MEA), founded in 2018. He believes in karmic capitalism, that “what goes around comes around,” and that businesses have a special responsibility to do more to be active in fostering a healthy society, starting with fostering a healthy company culture. At JDV, Chip created an employee pyramid of needs with three themes, borrowing from Maslow. Survival is the pyramid's base and is about money. Success is in the middle, focused on recognition. Transformation is at the peak and is about giving employees meaning. Over the years, JDV went through its up and down cycles, and his pyramid helped focus attention on these core employee needs, strengthening a company culture, especially in tough times, that was widely recognized for its low turnover in an industry infamous for the opposite. JDV's culture was reflected in each of its 50+ utterly unique hotels. If you were to line up each of JDV's properties, you would be convinced each was from a different hotel company. That was deliberate and contrary to industry practice. Each had a distinct personality catering to unique guest needs (i.e., Hotel Phoenix was the rock and roll hotel, Hotel Rex was for people who loved books, etc.). Chip wanted his hotels to be more than just a unique place to stay. They had to be part of the fabric of their communities, so JDV created cultural ambassadors whose responsibility was to find a local organization to support through the hands-on contributions of its employees. Chip's pyramid of caring for and supporting employee needs was paid forward by employees in how they cared for and supported the communities where they were located. To illustrate, Hotel Phoenix supported musicians suffering from hearing loss and Hotel Rex helped with literacy in San Francisco's Mission District. Years later, during his tenure at AirBNB, Chip leveraged his nearly 30 years of hotel experience to be a mentor to founder Brian Chesky, while also serving as a mentee who learned from people half his age about the world of technology. He imparted wisdom about the world of hospitality, and they imparted wisdom about technology, with the combination further strengthening AirBNB's culture. As AirBNB grew, it became apparent that the company had a unique platform that could be a force for good, helping house refugees (most recently in 2021 with refugees from Afghanistan in 2021), supporting artists in cities, or people who simply needed monthly housing to help them get back on their feet. Throughout the past decade, AirBNB's culture evolved from one defined by technology-driven convenience, to hospitality, to caring for society.