He’ll Be Peeking Under Beds, in Nooks at Leadership Forum

How far do you think you’d get if you asked one of your children to polish your shoes for you each week? That’s what J.W. “Bill” Marriott Jr.--now the hotel magnate--did as a boy for his father.

“As you can imagine,” Marriott writes in a new book, “my father was a challenge to live with. . . . Perfection was one notch below desired result.”

Like father, like son. If you’re running one of his hotels, you’d better be ready when Bill Marriott comes to visit--dust gone, doorknobs polished and happy faces at the front desk. He once fired a hotel manager with a fine record because Marriott discovered on such a visit that the man was despised by his entire staff.

“The only thing we manufacture is our smiles and our service to our customers,” Marriott told me in a telephone interview this week. “If we don’t keep our employees happy, it affects the people who stay at our hotels.”

Marriott, 65, chairman of the largest hotel management chain in the world, will be in OrangeCounty on Monday to speak at a leadership conference. It’s co-hosted by the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace and the Orange County Business Council. You get an “A” if you guessed the conference is set at a Marriott hotel, this one the Irvine Marriott.

Marriott even vacations at Marriott hotels; his favorite is the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Ariz. “I have no hobbies,” Marriott said. “Running this business is my avocation. At the dinner table, we talk sports, the church and business.”

Monday’s visit is double work for Marriott. He’ll get a chance to inspect some of his hotels and suites in the area--six in Orange County alone--and promote his soon-to-be published book, “The Spirit to Serve/Marriott’s Way.”

It isn’t meant as a bestseller. His audience is those who want to learn more about how to run a successful business. After reading the book this past week, it seems to me it can be summarized briefly: Think big but keep an eye on your cash.

Marriott’s goal is 2,000 hotels by the year 2000. He’s at 1,500 now but says he’s got enough building going on to make that goal. You have to figure his father would be proud of him.

Marriott’s father, J.W. Marriott Sr., started out in the restaurant business--he founded those A&W; Root Beer stands--and expanded to a few hotels. But it was Bill Marriott who had grandiose plans for turning his father’s business into a giant hotel and food service chain.

Marriott writes that he travels about 150,000 miles a year visiting his hotels. “If your name is above the door, it’s important for people to be able to link a face to the name. . . . I do get down on the floor and check under the beds. . . . I check out the laundry, kitchen, any corners that I think merit a quick look. There’s method to my madness. If I see smiling faces and well-scrubbed surfaces behind the scenes, I know that the rest of the hotel more than likely is doing just fine.”

Ned Snavely, general manager of the Anaheim Marriott, has endured many such tours by his boss.

“Any time the CEO comes in, you’re a little nervous, hoping for a good grade,” Snavely said. “But it’s also a time of high anticipation. It really is inspiring to the staff to have Mr. Marriott show up to shake hands with them and give them encouragement.”

Marriott does more than just look and listen. Snavely added: “He always leaves a few recommendations.”

Tiger’s Tiger: For years we’ve heard that golfer Tiger Woods is the namesake of his father Earl Woods’ closest friend in the Vietnam War, known to everyone as Col. Tiger Phong. But nobody had ever taken time to try to track down Woods’ friend.

Until Tom Callahan of Golf Digest took on the task this year. His quest began right here in Orange County. Sitting at the Woods home in Cypress in February, Callahan gathered information from Earl Woods that actually caused him a setback in his search for the colonel. Earl Woods thought that Phong’s name was Nguyen. A common error, since there are many Nguyens in Vietnam. Besides, Earl Woods had never known him as anything but Tiger.

The colonel’s name, instead of being Nguyen Dang Phong, was actually Vuong Dang Phong, Callahan learned. The mistake set him back several months in his research. But after a trip to Vietnam, Callahan finally tracked down Earl Woods’ friend. The news was sad.

Vuong “Tiger” Phong had been sent by the Communist victors to a re-education camp (we would call it a prison) in 1975. He died there the next year, according to his children, whom Callahan managed to find. His widow and some of his children now live in Tacoma, Wash. Until Callahan’s visit to them there, they were unaware that Tiger Woods, the famous golfer, was the son of the colonel’s best friend.

Woods said he had nicknamed his son Tiger in the hope “that my son would be as courageous as my friend.”

When Callahan brought the news of the colonel’s death to Tiger’s father, his response, Golf Digest reports, was, “Boy, does this ever hurt.”

Wrap-Up: Marriott includes an interesting chapter in his book about how Marriott almost bought Disney in the early 1980s. Marriott says he and his top executives spent three years studying the Disney numbers.

In the end, Marriott says, he decided Disney wasn’t right for him. Its success depended too much on creative juices he didn’t feel his company had the leadership to provide. Soon after that, Michael Eisner took control of Disney and made it wildly successful.

Marriott relates: “Eisner once asked me why I decided not to buy Disney. I told him it was because I didn’t know someone like him existed. If I’d been aware that a leader with his creative talent was available to run the show, I might have made a different decision.”

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling The Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823, by fax at (714) 966-7711 or by e-mail at jerry.hicks@latimes.com.