[Outliers] J.W. Marriott: Building an Empire Without a Master Plan

In 1927, a man from a farming town in Utah opened a nine seat root beer stand in Washington, DC with $6,000 to his name. By the time he died, that stand had become one of the largest hotel companies in the world with billions in annual sales, over a 100,000 employees, and a name you see all over the world. His name was Jay Willard Marriott, but everybody called him Bill. And here's what's strange about the Marriott story. You'd assume the man who built the world's largest hotel company was a hotel guy, but he wasn't. He didn't open his first hotel until he was in his mid fifties, and he fought against it the whole way. Hotels terrified him. He'd watched every major hotel chain in America go bankrupt during the depression, and he wanted nothing to do with them. So how did a man who was afraid of hotels end up building the world's largest hotel company? Marriott was never really a hotel company. And how Bill built it surprised me. Let's get into it. When Bill Marriott was 12 years old, his father pointed at a field of sugar beets baking in the Utah sun. Son, these beets sure need thinning. You're old enough to take care of that, aren't you? He hitched up a horse and drove off to town. Bill didn't pick up a hoe. Instead, he rounded up his seven brothers and sisters and made them an offer. How do you all like a nice bottle of soda pop? A whole bottle all for yourself. Well, all you gotta do is a little thinning out in the beet field. He gave the meat a row and rode to the store with a wagon. He came back holding a bag of cold bottles like a trophy. Finish your rows, and it's all yours. They worked faster and faster. All afternoon, his sister Doris remembered, we'd hoe the beet rose, just dying for a drink of that cold soda pop. Bill sure had a lot of work out of us. He was a born organizer, but it went deeper than just organizing. At 12 years old, he cracked one of the hardest principles in business. If a job is too big for one person, don't work harder. Find the right incentive and let other people help you carry it. To understand how a kid thinks this way, you need to know where he came from. Marriott Settlement, Utah was a tiny farming community named after Bill's grandfather who had trekked west with the Mormon pioneers. Life was simple and hard, planting and harvesting bitter cold and baking heat. Bill's father, Will, raised horses. But when a sugar factory went up about a mile south of the farm, he didn't keep doing what he'd always done. He switched the whole operation to sugar beets. He grew huge acreages and sold the beets the factory for processing, then carted back the leftover pulp to feed the …