motivational
A busboy's school essay became the Ritz-Carlton's golden rule
He had never been inside a hotel. He was eleven, and sure.
Horst Schulze was a 16-year-old busboy in a German resort town when he wrote a high school essay that would outlive the class it was written for. He had watched the way a ma\u00eetre d' treated guests, and the way the finest guests treated the ma\u00eetre d' right back. The essay was titled "We Are Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen." Decades later, as founding president of the Ritz-Carlton, Schulze put that sentence on a laminated card. Every employee gets one on their first day. The dishwasher is a gentleman. The housekeeper is a lady. Schulze knew the work from the inside. "I understood what it means being a busboy and dishwasher, a waiter, a cook," he told the Chief Executive Group in 2019. "I've looked at it from their side, made a few beds." He left home at 14 to start. He had decided the whole thing at 11, before he had ever set foot in a hotel.
