Mr. Catrett

Executive Leadership

Hospitality Education - It's Time for a Sea of Change

By Jeffrey Catrett, Dean, Kendall College Les Roches School of Hospitality Management

Imagine a world in which five and ten cent stores have faded from the landscape; a world in which Sears is no longer the dominant retailer, a world with no Marshall Field's and no Stern's and no Filene's. Imagine a world in which you can order your car in 256 different colors, yet General Motors struggles to survive against the onslaught of superior Japanese technology and European automotive styling. Imagine IBM selling solutions instead of mainframes. Imagine a world in which ABC, NBC and CBS must compete with 750 offerings including the Food Network and the Weather Channel.

It is not difficult really, for it has all come to pass, even though such a world was utterly unimaginable just thirty years ago. Now imagine a world in which Hilton, and Sheraton, and Marriott join Howard Johnson's, Statler, and Americana as fading icons of a time gone by. What started as product niching, through concept restaurants and boutique hotels supported by internet, is now a sea change in how the buying public is perceiving hospitality. The benefits of yesterday's standardization - reliable cleanliness and reservations - are now simply the expected attributes of any player in the game.

Today's increasingly travelled and savvy mid-scale and high-end customer no longer settles for "no bad surprises," seeking instead to be delighted outright. Increasingly, it is design, lifestyle harmonization, ambience, service style and delivery, creativity, flare and finesse that distinguish the winners from the losers. And it is precisely these very human elements of differentiation and customization, that do not conform to econometric models, defy focus group testing, and can only be measured and "proven" after the fact. Today's hospitality leaders need to be equipped not only with the scientific business skills to manage complex organizations, but also with the creative flare and aesthetic rigor to be able to bring together differentiated and consistent sensory and service experiences for increasingly discerning guests.

Nevertheless, today's hospitality education continues to embrace applied social science as the only source of teachable knowledge to future hospitality leaders. Academic conferences showcase endless streams of "scientific" research papers of questionable rigor and even more questionable relevance, and faculties seem unable to recognize that human knowledge is not only fact-based or scientific but also tradition-based or artistic, that arts are just as teachable and "scholarly" as are sciences.

In a recent discussion with the CEO of a major European hotel company, I asked about the restaurants he was putting back into his hotels. Specifically, I asked if he trusted concept development to his F&B people. He responded, "Oh God, no! I have people from fashion and theatre creating the ideas, and I just hope that the F&B people don't mess them up." Although there are certainly some very creative F&B managers in hotels, overall it is a damning commentary on hospitality education's inability to prepare leaders for the new world in which we find ourselves.

How we got to this juncture is easily traceable. It is the result of the legitimate improvement of hospitality education to face the needs of an evolving industry but also of academic status issues that are unique to university settings and have very little to do with the industry or even students.

Formalized hospitality education began in Switzerland in 1893 at the Ecole h^oteli`ere de Lausanne, expanding on the apprenticeship model and offering essentially vocational technical instruction for a fragmented cottage industry. A similar approach was taken when the first American hotel school was installed in the Home Economics building at Cornell University. In England, so-called "craft-based" education also dominated the hospitality landscape. Great hotel-keeping meant mastering the classical recipes, following the classical forms of general etiquette, arranging classical furniture, and learning accepted accounting practice and legal regulation. Providing the trappings of aristocracy to an emergent middle class dominated hotel-keeping throughout the Nineteenth Century up to the end of WWI. Education for hospitality involved largely rote memorization of classical recipes and formulas, practicing of motor skills, and finishing school elements - the disciplined refinement of social graces.

As hospitality in America consolidated and industrialized throughout the Twentieth Century with resulting product standardization, scale economies, sophisticated distribution, and control systems, American hospitality education (followed to some degree by hospitality education in the UK) began to move away from the earlier vocational technical model towards an applied business school model. This movement accelerated in the 1980's and 1990's as business school education became more prevalent and better articulated. The concurrent division of the industry into separate operations / franchising companies and ownership companies meant that real estate no longer subsidized operations. As a result, it became indispensable that hospitality operations managers be equipped with real business skills and not simply the skills to pretty up real estate for later sale at a premium.

Business school education has long borne the brunt of criticism within the academic community. Seen as insufficiently intellectual, business school faculty have struggled to gain the respect of their fellow academics within the university systems in which they live. In the second half of the Twentieth Century, pressure was put on business schools by university administrations to create knowledge based on theory supported by scientific proof. While this move has had the effect of greatly improving academic rigor, it has not necessarily developed the kind of business leader needed by today's industry.

As technology and production are increasingly commoditized, the human elements of design, style and service are becoming the differentiating factors. Today's business schools are criticized as inadequate in their preparation of future business leaders with "soft skills," developing instead strictly quantitative skills without the benefit of judgement, creativity, communication skill, or emotional intelligence. Business schools are responding to this criticism in the only way they know how - by turning to other social scientists. Psychologists help students learn about what is statistically proven in the spheres of communication and creativity, and "clinical" courses are showing up in new business school curricula. But knowing about yesterday's communication and creativity is not the same as knowing how to communicate and to be creative in today's fast-paced business environment.

Sadly, instead of turning to what it knows in its bones and finding new ways to improve rigor, hospitality education is at best muddled in trying to ape business schools, adapting general scientific theory to hospitality applications. Tenure is increasingly dependent upon publication in first tier peer-reviewed journals that place infinitely more importance on scientific rigor than on industry relevance.

At its worst, hospitality education retains the trappings of vocational technical teaching, i.e., teaching artisans and not artists. In a world of fusion and high design, teaching only the classical is akin to killing creativity and flexibility.

During the 1990's, hospitality industry conferences regularly featured speakers bemoaning the commoditization of the industry. For more than a decade, hospitality had looked up to the airline industry as a model, and now found itself in the peculiar situation of the airlines offering look alike boxes with non-descript service that were indistinguishable to the customer. For a period, it was assumed that whoever had the best reservations system, the greatest economies of scale, and the most pervasive loyalty program would win the battle of "last man standing." During the same period, hospitality schools and the universities that housed them began to question the need for hospitality education in general. If hospitality schools were only going to be second-rate business schools, then why not send future hotel leaders directly to the first-rate business schools and fold existing hospitality programs into better-funded business school infrastructures?

Fortunately, the boutiques and concept restaurants saved an industry threatened by commoditization with their focus on differentiation. This turn of events provides a cue to the rehabilitation of hospitality education, involving curricular changes that business schools cannot easily copy. What is needed in hospitality education today is not a return to the vocational technical regimens of the past. The scientific business elements of hospitality education are here to stay and rightfully so, as business pressures are greater than ever before. What is needed is an acceptance that the differentiating element in today's hospitality is not pure business but rather theatre, design, culinary art, and lifestyle harmonization - tradition-based elements that can only be taught with an arts approach. Today's industry is crying out for hospitality educators to embrace the art and science of hospitality. It is time for a sea change.

Jeffrey Catrett is Dean of the Les Roches School of Hospitality Management at Kendall College, Chicago having served previously as Dean of the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland and Academic Dean at the original Les Roches School in Bluche, Switzerland. Prior to joining academia, he held a number of management positions in hotel companies including Omni International and Swissôtel. His career spans twenty-five years and four continents. He holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MMH from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. Mr. Catrett can be contacted at jeffrey.catrett@hotelexecutive.com Extended Bio...

HotelExecutive.com retains the copyright to the articles published in the Hotel Business Review. Articles cannot be republished without prior written consent by HotelExecutive.com.