By Kevin Meyer
I posted this photo yesterday over at Lean Pics, but I can't get it out of my mind so I thought I'd share it with the EE community. This is a photo of the lobby of the Sheraton Hongqiao in Shanghai - sorry about the quality - I had to wait for one of the very few times you could see without a bazillion people around.
The gentleman on the far left sitting at a small desk right out in the open between the registration desk and the bank of elevators, where every one of the thousands of guests has to walk by him multiple times a day, is Thomas Mueller, the General Manager of the hotel. There's a large sign saying "General Manager" and he welcomes questions and concerns. He works at that desk all day, and if he has to leave his assistant general manager immediately steps in (and changes the sign to "Assistant General Manager").
Keep in mind this is a very large urban hotel with multiple restaurants and meeting rooms - it's a complex place to run. But if your business lives and dies by customer service, what better way to know what's going on and to immediately address concerns?
Now if he'd only been standing...!