2016 GLOBAL ALUMNI SUMMIT
The importance of company mojo
The second day of the summit opened with one of the most eagerly anticipated presentations of the weekend . Chip Conley , Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb , gave a phenomenal keynote speech on how great companies get their mojo .
Fifteen years ago , Chip Conley , veteran hotelier and former CEO of Joie de Vivre ( a company USA Today called “ the most delightfully schizophrenic collection of hotels in America ”), was having a bad day , or more accurately , a bad year .
At the time , the San Francisco Bay Area tech bubble had gone bust in a big way . The subsequent economic downturn hit the hotel industry particularly hard , forcing many hotels into bankruptcy and foreclosure . Conley and Joie de Vivre , both renowned successes prior to the burst of the tech bubble , began to struggle ; Conley and his executive team weren ’ t sure if their hotels were going to survive .
Seeking some literary inspiration on a bleak weekday afternoon , Conley made a trip to a San Francisco bookstore . He walked away , however , with much more than just a book .
In the bookstore ’ s psychology section , Conley came across Abraham Maslow ’ s Toward a Psychology of Being , which outlines the classic theory of the Hierarchy of Needs . For Conley , the theory planted the seeds for an idea that he would eventually use as a framework to develop organizational strategies that would change his own company and countless others . He later wrote about the framework and its application in his critically acclaimed book , Peak : How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow .
This experience was just one of the many topics Conley discussed as keynote speaker at the Global Alumni Summit in San Francisco this past June . Now the Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb , Conley described to a rapt audience of alumni how his Maslow-inspired framework changed the way Joie de Vivre approached its relationships with employees , customers , and investors . In many ways , the company defied the odds , tripling in size despite the economic downturn , and the boutique hotel company has only continued to grow in the years since .
Until Conley wrote about it in his book , the hierarchy of needs was not a theory necessarily associated with strategy and marketing ( although in his research for the book , Conley found that other companies had directly and indirectly incorporated the theory in their business approaches ). The theory itself is visualized as a pyramid with five levels , with each level representing human needs , from the most basic ( food and security ) at the base , to the highest level ( self-actualization , or fulfilling one ’ s full potential ) at the apex .
In a nutshell , the theory states that an individual must first meet the most “ basic level of needs ” before focusing on higher level needs . In other words , without the ability to meet needs like food and shelter , people will struggle to answer higher needs like building relationships and fulfilling career potential .
In his article “ Maslow ’ s Hierarchy of Needs ,” Saul McLeod , a psychologist at the University of Manchester , writes on why we often fluctuate between these levels . “ Every person is capable and has the desire to move up the hierarchy toward a level of self-actualization ,” McLeod says . “ Unfortunately , progress is often disrupted by failure to meet lower level needs . Life experiences , including divorce and loss of job may cause an individual to fluctuate between levels of the hierarchy .”
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