Episode 17: Dr. Bryan K. Williams

If you go onto Expedia.com to reserve a room for a one-night stay in Paris, you can stay at the Bulgari Hotel Paris for $1,159.00, or you can stay at the Hotel Saint-Marc for $193.00. Both have a spa, room service, and housekeeping. Both are near monuments, museums and local restaurants. So, what’s the difference? The perceived value of Luxury.

The hospitality industry has divided itself into many segments based upon customer type,  amenities available, hotel location and size. But sitting at the top of the lodging pyramid is the luxury hotel category. In that rarified stratum sit hotels like The Georges V in Paris, Claridges in London, The Montage in South Carolina, Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok, the Peninsula in Chicago. You will find words like “exquisite,” “bespoke,” “only the finest” and “nestled” on their websites. And to have those words apply to you, you will pay room rates that will range to the thousands in multiple of tens. 

I worked in the luxury segment for most of my professional life, and I can tell you it is different. The way the staff of a luxury hotel is trained to make you feel is the uncommon denominator that supports the rates these hotels charge for a night’s stay. You feel valued, treasured and important. Bryan Williams knows this too. He is a highly successful executive coach, but he spent much of his career teaching those luxury associates on how to provide the level of service that a guest paying to stay at Ritz Carlton Hotels expects to receive. So, when he talks about the perceived value of human life as the key to how we treat one another on the planet, he speaks from a place of knowledge, conviction and expertise. 

In our conversation, Bryan and I discuss expected topics like overcoming our self-imposed barriers to build thriving careers, the recipe for effective leadership and even his own improbable, faith driven ascension to success. But the jewel in this conversation is Bryan teaching us that if we are going to be successful as a human species on this planet, we must learn to see the value in each person we pass. For as Bryan reminds us, in our journeys, we have waited upon angels in our midst and did not know it.