There are books that set out to teach a profession. This one does not attempt to explain how to run a hotel, manage a restaurant or lead a team. If rooms, front desks, kitchens, balance sheets, guests or colleagues appear in these pages, it is only because that was the setting for an important part of my professional life. The real subject of this book lies elsewhere.
For more than twenty years, I ran hotels and restaurants. Like any manager, I learned to read indicators, control budgets, resolve conflicts and make decisions every day. For a long time, I believed that this was where the real learning of the profession took place. Over the years, I discovered that the lessons that ultimately transformed me almost never appeared on a dashboard, in a training session or in a management manual.
They came, almost always, from seemingly insignificant conversations, from my own mistakes, from uncomfortable decisions, from conflicts that appeared minor, and from situations that, while they were unfolding, I never imagined would eventually change the way I understood work, people and organisations.
With time, I realised that almost all those experiences had something in common. None of them left me with a definitive answer. Instead, they forced me to let go of certainties I had until then considered unquestionable. Looking back, I understand that my career was shaped less by the positions I held or the hotels I ran than by those decisions that gradually changed the way I thought.
That is why this book offers no advice, formulas or management models, nor does it attempt to establish truths about hospitality or gastronomy. What follows is the journey of a perspective that changed over the years. Each chapter begins with a real experience, not because the stories themselves are extraordinary, but because they were the experiences that forced me to reconsider my convictions and, often, replace them with others.
Writing these pages was also a way of retracing that journey. I discovered that many decisions reveal their true meaning only when time has given us enough distance to understand them. Perhaps that is why this book came to resemble a log more than a manual. It records not only what happened, but also the way each experience changed the perspective of the person who lived through it.
I do not know whether anyone who reaches the final page will know more about hotels. It would be enough for me if they found the journey of someone who, after many years of leading people and organisations, discovered that real learning was never about accumulating answers, but about allowing himself to be changed by the questions each experience placed before him.
Because, in the end, that is what hotels did to me.
This is not a finished book.
It is a log.
Welcome.