Reimagining of Westin - Part 1

Why This Matters

This story matters because it shows how real change in a company doesn’t start with a new name or logo—it starts with how we share what we know. In those early Westin years, people were hungry for clear expectations, tools, and training, but knowledge stayed trapped in drawers and in people’s heads.

Reimagining Westin is really about reimagining leadership: moving from “everyone reinvents the wheel” to “we build something stronger together.” That same shift—from hidden knowledge to shared practice—is at the heart of Succulent’s story of growth and change.

1981 – In the Beginning

Although I was hired by Western International Hotels, within two weeks of my start date our identity changed: Westin Hotels & Resorts was born. In 1981, “branding” was still a new idea. Renaming the company was only the first step in shifting from a loose collection of individual hotels to a global brand promising a narrow band of quality.

At that time, General Managers largely defined the Western International Hotel experience at the local level. There were no clear, measurable corporate standards; no inspection programs. Each hotel’s culture reflected its leader and its city. We valued those differences as much as we valued being part of the same company. We thought local, not global.

People Are Hungry to Understand Expectations

In my first nine years, I held seven roles at that same hotel: front and back of house, fine dining and fast dining, front desk and financial planning. I worked everywhere from the subterranean garage to the rotating restaurant and lounge on the 72nd floor. My perceptions and experiences were based on this single hotel, managed by the same General Manager over my tenure.

With each internal promotion, it felt like being pushed off a pier and judged on whether you sank or swam. There wasn’t much mentorship or formal training. Instead of corporate manuals, we relied on institutional knowledge—the best of the front‑line staff training the next wave, leaders teaching from local practice.

Even then, it was clear: people craved clarity. We needed manuals, checklists, and real training content, not just stories passed down in the hallway or office.

Writing Manuals Was Not Easy

In the 1980s, creating manuals was literally “manual labor.” No computers—just typewriters, whiteout, and a lot of patience. Many leaders struggled to articulate or document procedures. In an 1,100‑room hotel, there was almost no time set aside to capture what people knew. Hard things get postponed, and manuals were often first on the list.

If It’s Not Accessible, It’s Not Real

At my hotel, we were asked to think and write locally. We created departmental manuals without access to the corporate manuals. Those corporate manuals existed; they just weren’t visible.

I remember the Food & Beverage Cost Control manual: copied on pink paper, tucked into an interoffice envelope, filed away in a cabinet. At another point, after weeks of struggling to write a Front Office manual, my boss finally lent me his corporate version. I was stunned. I had led the Front Desk twice and never seen the document that could have anchored everything.

Recreating Versus Customizing

The culture defaulted to reinvention, not customization. For nine years, I assumed every hotel and department had to recreate the wheel. Opening hotels didn’t have it easier. As a designated trainer for Food and Beverage cost analysis, I helped new teams in Orlando, Hawaii, and Singapore. Their training was based on the practices in my hotel, because I was their trainer.

Once I joined the Westin Corporate Office, I learned that opening hotel budgets included funds to create their own “customized” manuals—yet another round of re‑creation, hotel by hotel. These customized manuals would be as thorough as the leaders compiling them.

Read What Happened Next

Looking back now, I see those early years as the “original” version of Succulent—a solid form, built with care, but still waiting to be transformed. The knowledge was there, but it lived in people’s heads, in pink‑paper manuals hidden in drawers, in stories told on the night shift.

Transformation didn’t start with a new name or a new logo. It started when we began to treat knowledge as something to be shared, not hoarded; to be layered and refined, not rewritten from scratch in every hotel.

In Part 2, I’ll share how we began to coil those scattered practices into something stronger—and what it took, as a leader, to help a company move from reinvention to true alignment.