Excellence Wins

Written by the co-founder and long-time president of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, this work sets out an uncompromising standard for luxury service and organisational leadership. Schulze recounts how the Ritz-Carlton service culture was designed and defended, and derives from that experience a set of principles for building an organisation capable of sustaining excellence.

It preserves in first-person form the operating philosophy of one of the most influential figures in modern luxury hospitality.

This work demonstrates the value of learning directly from experienced hotel leaders. Rather than presenting hospitality theory alone, it captures the practical judgement, leadership philosophies and lived experiences of successful hotel managers from around the world.

Few authors are able to speak to luxury service with the personal authority that Schulze commands. The book is both a first-person account of the construction of one of the most influential service cultures in the modern hotel industry and a working blueprint for the standards discipline required to sustain such a culture over time. The prose is plain, occasionally aphoristic, and consistently more demanding of the reader than its self-help packaging suggests.

Admitted because it preserves, in the words of one of its principal architects, the operating standards culture that shaped the contemporary understanding of luxury hospitality. The book is treated by the Institution as a primary source for the Ritz-Carlton service model — a model that, whatever its individual admirers or critics, has influenced almost every luxury hotel company operating today.

Modern luxury hospitality has been decisively shaped by a small number of individuals who built organisations capable of delivering an exceptional standard of service at scale. Of these figures, Horst Schulze is among the most consequential. The service culture he helped design at Ritz-Carlton became, over three decades, the widely imitated reference point for what a large luxury hotel company could aspire to be.

Schulze's testimony is significant because it is a working account rather than a retrospective one. He describes the standards, the training disciplines, the daily line-up, the empowerment principles and the leadership habits through which the culture was constructed, and he is unusually direct about which elements are essential and which are decorative. Read as a manual, the book is austere. Read as a primary source, it is invaluable.

The Institution admits this work because it is impossible to study modern luxury service seriously without engaging with the Ritz-Carlton tradition, and impossible to engage with that tradition seriously without hearing from those who built it. Schulze provides that testimony. The Library preserves it for the profession.