Once you’ve identified a long-term personal ambition, who will share in it with you?

Chapter 1 of the book emphasized the importance of leaders following their own personal ambition. Chapter 2 now examines how leaders at The Honest Company, The Bluebird Cafe, and The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company share their passion and enlist colleagues to help craft their modern legacies. It’s one thing to have a dream or know your long-term personal ambitions, but few people realize their dreams on their own. To migrate from dreaming to doing, they need the help of others who believe and behave the way they do. Harnessing beliefs and behavior to build your modern legacy starts from the inside out—with a strong brand culture.

A brand’s culture is a vehicle for its values, though it won’t drive itself. Nevertheless, too many brands treat their culture as if it were on autopilot. Although they start out with a virtuous pledge or a set of values, this rarely amounts to more than lip service. The reality is that most businesses relegate “culture” to boilerplate language in human resources handbooks. Even if employees can recite those handbooks word for word, that isn’t culture; it’s an echo chamber.

This is the problem with the way conventional brand leaders generally treat their culture: they devote more time to attitude than to action. This posturing creates a disconnect between beliefs and behaviors, and we’re all familiar with the consequences when companies don’t live by their words. At best, employees can regurgitate a meaningless mishmash of slogans, jargon, and corporate-speak. At worst, a negative culture emerges on its own and things get toxic. And when a brand culture goes bad, it takes everyone down with it.

Modern legacy builders understand that a strong culture is built on behaving your beliefs. Culture is the social bonding agent between intentions and deeds, the glue that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. When you get your culture right, it scales quickly as you grow, enabling better short-term decision-making. Though culture is famously difficult to create and maintain, those very qualities are what make it virtually impossible to copy. This explains why culture, done right, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Because brand culture is critical to the decisions you and your employees will make about products, services, and strategies today, tomorrow, and years into the future, it’s important to start building it right from the start. Begin with a core set of beliefs that support your long-term personal ambition. Make them clear and inspiring. In the words of Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, “Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex, intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple, stupid behavior.”¹³

Next, because words go only so far, leverage brand beliefs to inspire employee behaviors. In search of new ways to bring brand cultures to life, in this chapter we look to Christopher Gavigan, cofounder (along with Jessica Alba, Brian Lee, and Sean Kane) of The Honest Company, a modern legacy brand on a quest to create a cleaner world; Amy Kurland, champion of singer-songwriters and founder of The Bluebird Cafe (as well as her handpicked successor, Erika Wollam Nichols); and founding member and chairman emeritus of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Hervé Humler, who empowers legendary customer service at the iconic luxury hospitality brand. Their stories offer unique insights into how you too can cultivate an enduring brand culture in a short-term world.

By aligning behaviors with brand beliefs, modern legacy builders are finding new ways to migrate from dreaming to doing. When your long-term personal ambition inspires a shared set of brand beliefs that manifests in countless unique employee behaviors, your legacy in the making will thrive.

THE GUEST LIST at the 2008 launch party for Christopher Gavigan’s book Healthy Child Healthy World read like a Who’s Who of Hollywood, politics, and the music industry. Hosted by People magazine, A-list invitees included Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sheryl Crow, and First Lady Michelle Obama. Gavigan himself, a consumer advocate, would have been starstruck if much of the star power had not already personally contributed essays for his book, a how-to treatise for parents on creating a “cleaner, greener, safer home.”

As friends hoisted congratulatory toasts and a photographer from InStyle magazine worked the room, actress Jessica Alba weaved her way through the crowd and introduced herself to Gavigan. Eight months pregnant with her first child and recovering from an allergic reaction to laundry detergent, she had an urgent plea.

“Please,” she said, explaining that her due date was just a month away. “What do I buy?”

The question was familiar, and Gavigan didn’t miss a beat, offering guidance on nontoxic alternatives to mainstream baby products. The two quickly bonded over their shared concerns. Couldn’t someone do better? Did all corporations have to behave the same way?

“Parents don’t want to be weekend toxicologists,” Gavigan says, referring to the daunting task parents face when shopping for consumer packaged goods (CPGs), an industry often maligned for using opaque packaging and harsh chemicals. “They want someone to outsource their trust to.”

Gavigan was just that someone. The CEO of a nonprofit promoting nontoxic products and the proud author of a new book on the subject, Gavigan had years of experience in the field. Huddled together that evening in a star-studded hip Hollywood restaurant, neither the first-time author nor the expectant new mother had any idea that their casual encounter would someday lead to what many in the media now describe as a “billion-dollar brand.” Looking back, however, the story of how a good idea grew into an industry icon began right then with the connection of two like-minded believers envisioning a better kind of company—a company that behaved honestly. That night, the culture of a new brand was born.

In the months that followed, Alba continued to consult Gavigan about nontoxic products for her new baby girl. As their friendship grew, the conversation turned from product recommendations to a grander shared ambition: bringing healthier ingredients and honest labeling to the consumer packaged-goods industry.

Devoted to making a difference through legislation, Alba and Gavigan traveled to Washington, D.C., in 2011, lobbying on Capitol Hill for better regulations governing CPGs. Between Alba’s celebrity status and Gavigan’s stature as a consumer advocate, they figured they had a good chance of getting Congress’s attention. Lawmakers, however, didn’t listen and once again allowed the American Chemical Society to write its own rules. Disappointed but unfazed, the two friends returned home to California determined to rechannel their efforts into launching their own honest CPG company.

“I felt, here’s the moment when a company can actually set the standard,” says Gavigan. “We can self-regulate and self-impose the criteria that we believe should be in the marketplace.”

Joining forces with cofounders Brian Lee and Sean Kane, Alba and Gavigan launched The Honest Company in 2012. Like the aspirational name they chose, Honest’s cofounders wanted their brand to stand out in the CPG industry, imagining it as open and transparent, “a social enterprise with purpose-based DNA.” In other words, they wanted Honest’s principles to overshadow its products. In fact, contrary to many brands that launch with one iconic product or service and gradually branch out, Honest launched with an entire product line on day 1, introducing 17 nontoxic personal care products in all.

“In our mission statement, we don’t talk about products,” Gavigan says. “We talk about creating a healthier, safer, happier lifestyle. Our products are the tools we use to educate, empower, and change behavior.”

Honest’s focus on principles before prod-ucts exemplifies how modern legacy brands build a strong culture from the inside out by channeling employees’ shared beliefs into authentic brand behaviors. The message has resonated with consumers. Today, Honest sells more than 200 nontoxic products, generating some $300 million in revenue.

As Honest takes up more space on retail shelves, however, longstanding CPG titans such as Johnson & Johnson and Unilever are taking stock.¹⁴ As recently as 2016, rumors swirled that Unilever would buy the upstart brand for upward of $1 billion. Expressing gratitude for Honest’s good fortune so far but no less ambitious to continue driving change, Gavigan points to the brand’s principles as integral to its success.

“Those principles are the foundation of this company,” Gavigan says. “That’s the promise we are offering the world.”

As the task of keeping that promise each and every day falls to its employees, Honest treats its brand culture as its primary product, investing in efforts to ensure that employee behaviors stay true to its core principles. The principles on the previous page have guided The Honest Company through exponential growth since its earliest days, allowing the brand to build its modern legacy from the inside out.

Big corporations traditionally are known for one iconic product or service, not for their brand values. If you worked at Ford, for example, you built cars. Levi Strauss & Co.? You made jeans. Employees at Ma Bell kept the phone lines up and running. A brand’s corporate culture—the internal beliefs and behaviors cultivated behind the scenes—has almost always taken a backseat to the products and services that brand produced. This generally meant that what you made or what you did while at work was what everyone noticed—not the underlying reason you felt a calling to work in the first place.

Culture-driven companies such as The Honest Company are demonstrating that what a brand believes can eclipse what it makes. These modern legacy brands put long-term ambitions before short-term motives, ultimately achieving the kind of success that doesn’t always fit within the margins of a quarterly revenue report. In Honest’s case, the brand’s success has led to heightened consumer awareness and indirectly to industrywide improvements in the way ingredients are selected, sourced, and labeled. Though brands like Honest aren’t yet the norm, those which are behaving the best are proving that culture and brand can be synonymous. So long as a brand and its principles remain indistinguishable, culture has a better chance of scaling as the brand grows.

With Honest’s rapid growth has come the need to hire—quickly. How has Honest kept brand behaviors in harmony with its principles? By establishing bedrock principles at the outset, standing by them over the years, and diligently hiring employees who share them.

The task of keeping principles and behaviors aligned falls to Gavigan, now Honest’s chief purpose officer and the person in charge of company culture. Scaling—making sure that the next 3,500 employees understand and follow the brand’s mission as well as the first 350 have—is his biggest concern. To keep everyone pointed in the right direction, Gavigan starts by ensuring that colleagues understand the brand’s principles. (Gavigan’s book—now a bestseller and one of the brand’s unofficial charter documents—is required reading for every new employee.) Finding ways to reinforce the brand’s principles through day-to-day decisions is the next step. The goal, says Gavigan, is to make sure everyone is “grounded in who we are and where we are going,” affording the brand a position of clarity and strength.

“We are not going to compromise,” he says. Of course, it takes more than sage words on a page to keep grounded as you grow. To maintain a focus on brand principles and behaviors, Gavigan works directly with employees, whether it is in one-on-one training sessions, leadership meetings, or brandwide innovation gatherings, the latter of which are affectionately called “Kombuchas with Christopher.”

“I intentionally walk through the office every day and think, ‘How do I impact a person to get them more excited about what they’re doing at work that’s in tune with our mission?’” he says. “Because if I’m not doing that, then they’re not getting it.”

The benefits of this kind of collective buy-in and shared vision are particularly evident when brands must make tough decisions, such as how to handle nuanced ethical or philosophical issues. As a leader in safe, healthy products, for example, Honest could justly criticize competitors for using caustic ingredients or misleading packaging. Instead, the brand tries to rally consumers and competitors alike toward cleaner, greener ways of doing business. As Gavigan puts it, “Honest would rather shine a light than cast a shadow.”

“It would be easy for us to call out other companies for wrongdoings—for being disingenuous, greenwashing, making false statements, or being dishonest in their marketing practices,” Gavigan admits. “But I don’t think that’s the way you build great reputations and become iconic over time. I think it’s really our job to lure people by building a bonfire that’s purposeful and strong—a bonfire that draws people in through our education, our voice, our tone, our beauty, our design, and our standards.”

The glow of Honest’s bonfire has drawn a crowd. Although corporate America generally discounts company culture as a “soft” business discipline, Honest provides undeniable evidence of the profound competitive advantages of being disciplined about your beliefs, not just your bottom line. Beyond keeping talent, Honest’s ability to rally more and more employees around its core principles as it grows demonstrates the scalability of a shared set of beliefs. Even as the brand expands in size, reach, and revenue, Honest’s founding principles have remained cultural touchstones, guiding brand behavior. Meanwhile, as difficult as culture is to create and maintain, particularly during a company’s growth, every brand culture is inherently unique, rendering it impossible for competitors to replicate it. Gavigan says the most inspiring competitive advantage may be that Honest’s cultural discipline affords the brand limitless opportunities to express its principles.

“Right now, we are using the products as tools to ignite the conversation,” Gavigan explains. “Five years from now, we could be doing something totally different.”

In a fiercely competitive CPG landscape in which rivals are quick to emulate products and marketing tactics, Honest will have to continue holding its cultural torch to maintain its position in the industry. First and foremost, this means staying true to its word: keeping Honest honest. To do that, Gavigan and his colleagues are protecting Honest’s culture as if it were the brand’s bestselling product. Which, in many ways, it is.

BY THE TIME Garth Brooks appeared for his audition at The Bluebird Cafe in 1987, the singer-songwriter had been turned down by some of country music’s biggest record labels. Rolling up to The Bluebird’s unassuming storefront in suburban Nashville, Brooks walked in, sat down, and began to play.

“I didn’t know who he was, but I gave him the highest score I have ever given anybody for the audition,” recalls Amy Kurland, The Bluebird’s founder and the patron saint of Nashville’s singer-songwriter community. Since opening the cafe in 1982, Kurland has always put the music first, ensuring that The Bluebird’s doors were open to newcomers. Though Kurland could have booked bigger acts, she believed in Brooks from the start.

“I thought he was lovely and had tremendous presentation,” she says of Brooks, then just 26 years old. “He just had that charisma.”

When Brooks returned to play before The Bluebird’s small, live audience (the cafe’s 20 tables, small bar, and eight church pews seat about 100), he got a standing ovation. When he returned again the next year, he got his first record deal.

“Capitol Records, the record label that had already turned him down, was there in person,” Kurland recalls. “I mean, they grabbed him, took him down the back hall, and made him agree to sign a record deal with them right there!”

Brooks is not the only country music legend to get a start on The Bluebird’s intimate stage. Since the cafe opened in 1982, Vince Gill, Kathy Mattea, Dierks Bentley, Keith Urban, Taylor Swift, and Lady Antebellum have all walked through The Bluebird’s doors with the same dream. In each case, the cafe’s supportive founder (and manager, booking agent, bartender, janitor, accountant …) made sure her doors were open to new acts even if they didn’t always fill the seats.

Today, The Bluebird Cafe is one of the world’s premier country music venues. It is the kind of place where emerging musicians and stadium-filling stars alike have a chance to perform within arm’s reach of their audience. Kurland purposely limited seats in its iconic In the Round circular performance space to protect what she describes as the “incredible, intimate moment of audience and musicians all sharing in a way that is less performance than it is community.”

“We are a listening room,” she stresses. “The Bluebird is much less interested in selling the maximum numbers of drinks than it is in making sure the musicians are listened to. It is probably the most important thing The Bluebird does.”

To better understand Kurland’s unwavering commitment to providing up-and-coming singer-songwriters a space to perform, we have to go back to the beginning—to 1982. Kurland was just out of college when she opened The Bluebird with some money from her grandmother. Though she had worked in restaurants, she confesses she had no idea what she was doing during the first few years. Eager to learn more about running a business, she signed up for extracurricular courses at the local community college, attending class after working in the kitchen and vacuuming floors at The Bluebird all day.

“The one that impacted me the most was a marketing class where I learned you have to be one thing,” she says. “You can’t be everything to everybody. You have to think about what you do best.”

Kurland and The Bluebird are now known for creating a world-famous performance venue for up-and-coming singer-songwriters, but back when she was just getting started, the cafe was just that: a cafe. It didn’t even have a place to perform. When a boyfriend suggested that she add a stage so that his band could play, she decided to give it a shot. Little did she know it at the time, but that was when her legacy in the making really began to take shape.

As Bluebird performances began to draw more listeners, Kurland decided to lean into the music. First, she dropped lunch service and added second shows in the evenings—one for up-and-coming songwriters and another for established artists. Audiences kept lining up. Before long, they were cramming to get in. Kurland had found her “one thing”: creating a space where musicians could be appreciated by audiences that really listened.

Always one to back up her beliefs with action, Kurland was receptive to ideas that would improve the unique atmosphere and experience of her “listening room.” Perhaps the most notable example of this came during a night of drinking when a group of singer-songwriters (several of whom are now in the Country Music Hall of Fame) asked if they could perform in the center of the cafe, eye to eye with the audience, instead of up on the stage against the wall. Not only would the performance be more intimate, the music would be the center of attention. Although nobody but Kurland remembered making the suggestion the next day, she followed through. The now-legendary In the Round performance space was born.

Guardian angel of The Bluebird’s “listening room,” Kurland resisted adding seats even as crowds swelled outside her doors. With just 100 audience members, performances took on a reverent dimension uncommon to most live music spaces. “Shhh!” became the cafe’s motto. It wasn’t just talk. Under Kurland’s watchful eye, noisy audience members were kept in line.

Year after year, decade after decade, Kurland watched over The Bluebird’s one-of-a-kind listening room, content to let other aspects of the business follow the one thing The Bluebird does best.

“The music is the thing that makes The Bluebird perfect,” she says. “The Bluebird is small. Musicians can’t make the most money here. We don’t have a greenroom, and we don’t have a fruit basket for them, but we give musicians and songwriters the things they want most in the world: to be listened to and the chance for their performance to perhaps carry them to the next level.”

As Kurland neared retirement, however, the brand she built and the reverent space she had cultivated faced an existential crisis. If Kurland sold The Bluebird to the highest bidder, she knew its unique place in the culture of country music would not survive under a traditional restaurateur or bar owner.

Talking about brand beliefs is one thing, but providing them with the constant care and feeding necessary to keep them alive and well is where most companies fall short. This is particularly the case when money is on the line. Looking to sell her beloved cafe and retire, Kurland knew the decision she was about to make would be one of the most significant of her life.

Thinking back, Kurland recalls the questions running through her mind as she approached retirement. “When I decided after 25 years I was tired of the harder parts of running a venue—fixing the ice machine and taking care of the plumbing, which was my job too—I started to think, ‘How could this go on after me?’ I couldn’t sell it to an individual or even a big business because there is far more money in running a sports bar than running a listening room.”

At that point, Kurland made a selfless decision. Determined to keep The Bluebird as it was rather than see it transformed into a sports bar or, worse, a sad parody of itself under an unscrupulous new owner, she decided she would be willing to relinquish any profits from selling the cafe if she could find a way to pass The Bluebird forward to an owner who appreciated it as much as she did. Reaching out to the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI)—the world’s largest not-for-profit trade songwriters association—she spoke to Erika Wollam Nichols, a former Bluebird employee and the NSAI’s director of development.¹⁵ Having weighed the decision carefully, Kurland proposed donating The Bluebird to the NSAI.

Honored by the offer, Wollam Nichols and the NSAI, which is “committed to protecting the rights and future of the profession of songwriting,” insisted on paying Kurland a fair price. Like the faithful hero of so many of those country songs she had listened to In the Round over the years, Kurland got a happy ending.

Back at The Bluebird, the band played on. By entrusting her business to a like-minded owner capable of carrying her modern legacy forward, Kurland’s last act as The Bluebird’s owner ensured that the cafe would survive, maintaining its core fan base and authentic place in the culture of country music.

“I knew I wanted this place to exist long after I was gone,” she says. “The Bluebird has become part of the fabric of Nashville and really part of the process for artists and songwriters to get started here. When you first get in, you get out of your car or get off the bus and you’ve got to find a place where you can walk in and start playing. The Bluebird is one of those live music venues where the doors are always open.”

When a brand is successful, opportunities to cash in on that success—opportunities that come from the outside in—should be weighed against the brand’s core values. That is easier said than done. Similarly, when a brand is faltering or changing hands, any opportunity to turn a profit can be difficult to turn down. Regardless of the financial circumstances, modern legacy builders like Kurland speak through action; that is how you build modern legacy from the inside out.

Under the NSAI and Wollam Nichols, The Bluebird Cafe remains true to its roots to this day because its leadership values long-term ambitions more than short-term profits. The Bluebird Cafe Concert Series in Sundance—which began under Kurland and features multiple events throughout the summer—continues more than 15 years later. Since Kurland’s departure, The Bluebird’s star has continued to rise, much like many of the legends who got their start on its stage. Today, The Bluebird sponsors and curates events around the world, such as the C2C: Country to Country festival in London, England. Most notably, in 2012 The Bluebird became a regular on-set location in the hit TV show Nashville.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled with being part of [the show Nashville] and, in general, with the way The Bluebird is represented,” says Kurland. “The Bluebird is a character in the show. And with all the crazy, dramatic things that happen [on the show], whenever they want to get back to the heart and the soul and the reason why people do this, they put a song in The Bluebird—and I love that.” So do The Bluebird’s loyal fans and performers.

Although the growing spotlight has resulted in perennially sold-out shows for the tiny space, the NSAI and Wollam Nichols have continued to cultivate the spirit of Kurland’s Bluebird for the next generation to enjoy, keeping true to the brand culture Kurland passed forward and Wollam Nochols carries on. Proud of what The Bluebird continues to achieve, Kurland still counts herself among its regulars. After all, some shows are too good to miss.

Such was the case on a cool October evening in 2016 when Garth Brooks returned to play on the stage where he got his start in Nashville. Nearly 30 years since his Bluebird debut, Brooks is the bestselling solo artist in U.S. history, having sold more than 149 million albums, beating Elvis Presley and second only to the Beatles in total album sales overall.¹⁶ Yet there he sat before an audience not much bigger than the one at his first performance at The Bluebird three decades earlier. Once again, he got a standing ovation.

“Garth Brooks is a tremendous talent,” says Kurland. “He didn’t need The Bluebird to get famous. He needed to be seen in person in a setting where people were really listening.”

Fortunately for country music audiences and artists alike, The Bluebird is still providing just that. Stop in the next time you pass through Music City. Kurland may not be there to greet you, but because of the modern legacy she passed forward—putting deeds before words and sticking to the brand’s values—The Bluebird’s doors are still open today.

THE RITZ-CARLTON, DUBAI is a palatial resort situated on the broad white sands of Jumeirah Beach in the United Arab Emirates. Its low-slung suites with richly detailed Arabic and Mediterranean architectural accents eschew the soaring skyscrapers for which the city has become famous. Adjacent to the Emirates Golf Club and the JBR Walk, Jumeirah Beach is Dubai’s only beachfront promenade of luxury retail boutiques and al fresco cafes. The Ritz-Carlton property there is designed to provide patrons with anything they could want in a luxury beachfront resort. Although The Ritz-Carlton prides itself on anticipating its guests’ wishes, every now and then something new comes along.

One afternoon not too long ago, a 14-year-old boy in a wheelchair looked out on the clear blue waters of the Persian Gulf. Speaking wistfully to his family, he talked about swimming “in that beautiful ocean.” The boy had never walked in his life, let alone swam.

Though the resort and the ocean were separated by about 200 meters of sand—making it impassable to anyone in a wheelchair—the staff heard about the boy’s wish, and in a matter of hours the hotel engineer had built a wooden walkway leading to the surf. That same day, for the first time in his life, the young boy left his wheelchair on the beach and went swimming in the ocean.

This is what The Ritz-Carlton calls a “Wow” story: an example of generosity and anticipatory service that “creates a memory for someone that will last a lifetime.” Hervé Humler, a founding member of the hotel brand and now the company’s chairman emeritus, regularly shares Wow stories with his colleagues at the brand’s headquarters. It’s nothing new. In fact, sharing Wow stories like this is a daily practice at each of the company’s 90-plus properties all over the world. By sharing these Wow stories, the brand’s employees in turn inspire their colleagues to new heights of service.

“What I’m proudest of is that it’s not about telling our employees they have to do it,” Humler says. “Nobody told our hotel engineer in Dubai that he had to build a walkway. Instead, we have built a culture, and an ambience, in which employees want to do their job. And we, more importantly, have empowered our people to do so. Empowerment is a very powerful and meaningful ingredient. Our people want to make an active, not passive, contribution to be a real part of making something memorable.”

Based on the number of Wow stories coming out of The Ritz-Carlton, Humler and his colleagues have struck on a winning formula for empowering their employees or, as the brand prefers to call them, “ladies and gentlemen.”

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has long been lauded for setting the gold standard for anticipatory service, twice earning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award presented by the president of the United States. In 2016, the company was named the top-ranking luxury hotel brand in North America for guest satisfaction by J.D. Power and Associates, receiving the highest score ever earned by any luxury brand in that category.¹⁷

Reflecting on the brand’s enduring success, however, Humler doesn’t focus solely on conventional business measures such as RevPAR (revenue per available room). Nor does he dwell on survey-driven accolades like those noted above. Instead, Humler speaks passionately about the need for ongoing investment in the brand’s strong internal culture by empowering employees to add to the brand’s story.

“Our 40,000 ladies and gentlemen not only embrace the culture that has been passed down, but they also contribute to growing the culture every day,” he says. “We are constantly opening hotels around the world. No matter how beautiful a building might be, it never has heart or soul until we animate it with our employees.”

In an increasingly homogenized global economy in which computers answer most customer service calls and self-checkout lanes are increasingly common, The Ritz-Carlton has a refreshingly human approach to service. Everyone contributes, and Humler readily declares that his employees are more important than he is. In contrast, perhaps the biggest flaw in the way traditional organizations think about employee culture is the misconception that it can be maintained from the top down with corporate identity manuals and human resources training sessions alone. These methods amount to simply telling people to do something rather than empowering them. Internal culture is not a top-down arrangement; culture goes both ways. Engaged employees want to contribute in a meaningful way, not simply fall in line.

It’s a lesson The Ritz-Carlton learned through experience.

“In the early 1980s and 1990s, we focused too literally on consistency,” Humler recalls. “The fronts of The Ritz-Carlton hotels all looked the same. The inside of the hotels all looked the same. The bedrooms all looked the same.” Similarly, the brand once expected guests at its restaurants to abide by a standard dress code. Both are examples of how the brand used to manage uniformity and appearance.

In recent years, however, the brand has grown away from this kind of top-down uniformity, allowing each property to express more of its own unique identity and recognizing that new generations of guests increasingly express success in contemporary, less formal attire.

“We were too formal and stuffy for some,” Humler admits. “A few years ago, when people would come to our hotel in jeans, we would say, ‘If you don’t have a coat and tie, you’re not going to have dinner with us.’ But now, when they come in with flip-flops, we say, ‘Good day and welcome!’”

Ultimately, The Ritz-Carlton’s evolving understanding of what it means to be a place for successful people is perhaps best expressed in the way the brand now empowers its employees to bring its values to life each day. Just as no one told the hotel engineer in Dubai that he had to build a walkway, success at The Ritz-Carlton is not about literal compliance or conformity. Success comes from helping employees internalize the company’s principles so that each employee can express them in his or her own unique way. When everyone understands a brand’s ambition and has the same passion, brand values will find their way into the fabric of the internal culture. It’s essentially weaving a living tapestry of modern legacy that everyone can appreciate and add to rather than simply comply with. It all comes back to empowerment, Humler says.

“Invest in people,” he explains. “Give them the tools they need to contribute to your vision, mission, and culture.”

Long celebrated for its service philosophy beyond the hotel industry, in 2000 The Ritz-Carlton opened its Leadership Center. The vision: Share what the company has learned about embracing a culture of service with brands in other industries. The results speak for themselves. Apple famously launched its Genius Bar after sending employees to the Leadership Center, and over the years brands in every imaginable industry—from automotive, energy, and finance to fitness, healthcare, technology, and more—have sent staff to learn how to inspire their employees. As a result, the impact of The Ritz-Carlton’s empowerment philosophy can be felt all over the world.

Another method the brand uses to reinforce its values and empower its employees is through “Line-Ups,” 15-minute meetings with employees. In contrast to staff meetings at some companies, which may happen once a week, month, or quarter, leaders at The Ritz-Carlton hold Line-Ups at the beginning of every shift—three times a day at all 90-plus locations around the world. Line-Ups are held even at the company’s corporate headquarters, where Humler first started the tradition.

“You need to meet with your team for at least a few minutes every day,” he says. “We cover the priorities for the day as well as reinforce our values. We talk about how we aim to treat our guests. We also share a Wow story”—like the story of the boy in the wheelchair who got to swim in the ocean.

Other Wow stories abound. There’s the time a guest forgot his computer at the hotel and had to give a presentation later that day. A Ritz-Carlton employee found the laptop, boarded a flight, and delivered it in time for the event. And there’s the time a little boy left behind a beloved toy giraffe at a hotel property. He was overjoyed and awestruck when the giraffe arrived in the mail days later, complete with a photo album of it kicking back by the pool, getting a massage at the spa, and enjoying the hotel’s many amenities.

At the center of each Wow story are ladies and gentlemen—the brand’s believers—and as their stories are celebrated internally, they empower other believers and inspire new stories for the world to see. It’s a virtuous cycle in which The Ritz-Carlton aims to make sure all of its guests “get their memory’s worth, not just their money’s worth.”

“Make the people around you the greatest evangelists of your brand,” Humler advises. “People make you successful—so help people succeed.”

Most brands talk about what they make and how they make it. Not enough communicate why.

Fast Company’s origin story is an excellent example of why brands should “start with why.” The provocative instruction at the heart of author Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle model, “starting with why” encourages brand leaders to reflect on why they do what they do. Although the other two questions—how a company conducts business and what functional products or services it sells—are more familiar, the why is the most important statement a company or leader can make to inspire others to rally around it and share in its central ambition. In the case of Fast Company, founding editors Bill Taylor and Alan Webber understood that the world of work and the competitive pace of global business were moving faster than others in their industry could keep up with.

In 1995, after successful careers as editors at the Harvard Business Review, Taylor and Webber set out to launch Fast Company. The clue to their “why” is still right there in the title of the magazine.

Just off a sabbatical in Japan, Webber was convinced that globally, business was changing—fast. The dawn of the Internet was revolutionizing the way businesses competed, people worked, and customers shopped. Webber and Taylor also saw that traditional U.S. media—including the business magazines and newspapers themselves—were missing those rapid changes entirely. Seeking to advocate for newer, faster, and better ways of competing (the brand’s why), the cofounders named their new magazine Fast Company: a call to motivate leaders to perform at the speed of modern business.

© 2017 Simon Sinek from Start With Why by Simon Sinek

Informed by their why, they came up with a clear, powerful manifesto (the brand’s how) and printed that statement on the cover of the first issue: “Work is personal. Computing is social. Knowledge is power. Break the rules.”

“The words on the cover of that first issue, including the Fast Company banner, were written to be nailed up on our office wall,” says Webber.

Guided by an understanding of their why and how, the cofounders began looking for journalists and editors who shared their beliefs and could report on the changes taking place across multimedia platforms, most notably the magazine (the brand’s what).

“Our elevator pitch was that we were going to create something that was a cross between the Harvard Business Review and Rolling Stone,” says Webber.

Once they began hiring with traits like those in mind, a unique personality and character began to emerge. Irreverent and sharp, the brand’s refreshing take on business generated a culture of attraction across the publishing industry. Applicants, eager to join the vanguard of a new era of business journalism, flooded the cofounders with résumés.

Readers loved it. Alongside its familiar established competitors, Fast Company’s unique perspective and style was an instant success. The company quickly rocketed from 100,000 launch issues to an estimated readership of more than 3 million and set a record as the fastest-growing business magazine in history.¹⁸ Fast Company was literally a fast company.

Still thriving decades later, the Fast Company brand continues to reflect the very changes it reports on. By tapping into the why behind their brand and literally naming the magazine to indicate the rapidly evolving changes happening in business, Fast Company set the tone for how journalists everywhere report on the fast-paced, competitive digital era.