Marriott's Youngest Son Makes His Mark
Fast Rise of Hotel Firm's Global Sales Chief Prompts Speculation About Succession

By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 29, 2007

There are moments for many parents when they look at their children and see themselves. It happened to Bill Marriott a few weeks ago during breakfast in Tokyo.

The hotel magnate, now 75 and slower with his steps but not his drive, was in Japan with his youngest son, David, who is 34 and the head of global sales at the Bethesda company that shares their last name. They were meeting the local sales team. David was a few minutes late, so his father got things started.

Bill Marriott is famous for his folksy touch with his front-line employees, but that morning, uncharacteristically, he went around the table very businesslike, pressing the sales crew for details on their deals. The employees were tense. Bill Marriott could feel it. Then in walks David, being Mr. Funny, cracking jokes, asking about their families.

"In a minute and a half, everyone was laughing and feeling good," Bill Marriott said, and it got them all talking. "It was telling to me: It was what I should have done and what I normally do."

It's one thing for a parent to feel joy in spotting a likeness in a child but quite another thing to do so in the context of a $15 billion company when the largest shareholder is one's family. More complications develop when Dad is 75, and what people want to ask but fear doing so is: Who comes after you? Reading the tea leaves becomes something of a sport around the office. It's a fact of life for the Marriotts that will loom larger as David radically reorganizes group and corporate bookings, moving sales reps out of individual hotels and into regional centers. Though it may sound bureaucratic, no one else does it that way. It has the potential to irritate some hotel owners, but it's a move Dad calls "the most transformational event that's happened here in a long time."

With David making one of his first significant public decisions at Marriott International, the questions are inevitable: Is he the real deal? And if he is, will he one day run the company his dad built? The questions follow David in a sort of silhouette. "I would be a complete liar if I would say there is no pressure there," he said, sitting on the couch of his office near a labyrinth of cubicles at the company's headquarters. "As a Marriott, you always live with the feeling that you're being looked at under a microscope."

There are four Marriott children. The oldest, at age 50, is Debbie, who works on government affairs. Stephen, 48, has a rare muscular disorder that has left him hearing-impaired and blind, and he works on culture issues and special events. John, 46, was head of lodging but left the company two years ago to run his family's investments. That leaves David as the only Marriott offspring working on day-to-day operations.

He has run global sales for three years, overseeing a department that takes in roughly 40 percent of the business at Marriott's full-service hotels. His first major initiative -- called SalesForce One -- shifts salespeople out of the company's hotels and into regional sales offices, where they will sell rooms at dozens of Marriott properties, not just the hotel where they were based. The idea is to sell to customers the way they want to be sold to: not by individual sales people calling from every hotel in a region, but one point of contact offering rooms at a variety of properties.

It helps Marriott, which manages hotels, please its deep-pocketed corporate clients, streamlining the booking process. But the company's hotels have individual owners with their own economic interests. Until now, owners could rest assured that salespeople were specifically focused on selling their property.

"A regional sales approach will definitely have greater appeal to the clients who we must ultimately serve and therefore should increase brand preference," said Fred Malek, a former top executive at Marriott who owns several of the company's hotels. "But it also has to be blended with consideration for the profit/loss interest of individual general managers in a diverse ownership group."

David acknowledges that there is uneasiness from some owners, but said: "What we have told them is that fair share in the new world will be different from the old world. The whole system will get a lift from SalesForce One." He has taken a lead role in reassuring hotel owners.

"There's quite high expectations from stakeholders when he walks in the room," said his boss, Amy McPherson, Marriot's executive vice president of sales and marketing.

John Williams, the president of DiamondRock Hospitality, a Bethesda hotel owner, was in the audience when David presented details of SalesForce One. "David has a lot of his dad in him and has always been a very effective communicator," Williams said. "They've been very good about meeting owners' concerns about this so far. But the truth is in the rollout."

Among the Marriott children, David is the most naturally relaxed when put on the spot. He is a free spirit who hasn't let his last name impinge on attempts to have fun. He attended Grateful Dead concerts as a teenager. (His father's musical taste runs more toward Glenn Miller.) More dangerously, when he was 19, he stole Dad's car in the middle of the night. In this case, it was a red Ferrari Testarossa. David wrecked it on Clara Barton Parkway. He said his first thought was: "Why didn't that accident kill me? Now I need to tell my dad what happened."

David wasn't seriously injured, but his parents rushed to the hospital. David said his father walked in and said, "I'm glad you're alive" and then walked out. A few days later, David replaced the car with family money that had been set aside for him. They joke about the accident now, and his dad said recently, "I was more concerned about his health than anything else."

The Marriotts are devout Mormons. The Ferrari episode occurred shortly before David left for his mission, which is two years of proselytizing in a far-off land. (His father didn't serve on a mission; he was in the Navy during the typical missionary age.) Though the mission would have been a decent way for David to avoid his father for a while after the crash, David almost didn't go. He wrestled with the idea for months, unable to come to grips with his religion. "I had really close friends, and none of them were going on a mission at that age," David said. "It was hard. I had been taught the Mormon faith all of my life. But personally in my heart I don't think I was converted to it at that point."

David said he prayed and consulted heavily with his brother John before giving it a chance. He was assigned to England, and he went door to door for two years, telling people about the faith. People are not always welcoming in such situations. "It was a phenomenal experience for me," he said. "It was the first time in my life, as a young 19-year-old, that I really looked outside myself. It taught me how to work and to think about others' interests and needs above mine. It taught me how to be grateful."

David's experience was on his father's mind a few years ago, when the company's global head of sales left for a tourism industry job. David had gone from working in Marriott kitchens to sales positions at hotels in Boston and then the Washington area. His father thought David, then 31, was ready for his big break. "When you're on a mission selling door to door, there's no harder sale than that," Bill Marriott said. "He was fearless. He kept on going. He learned the great importance of determination and strong leadership."

Bill Marriott said he knew what the reaction would be: "He's young, he's getting the job because he's a Marriott. But I knew he was well respected and he learned as much as he could about this job."

McPherson, David's boss, said, "He has worked like a dog, honestly."

So far, the whispers around Marriott headquarters are that David is probably too young to be considered his father's certain successor. The smart money is still on Arne Sorenson, the chief financial officer. But what if Bill Marriott, who has no plans to retire, works another six or seven years? David would be in his 40s by then. For his part, Bill Marriott isn't exactly interested in having the conversation. Asked whether he could see David in his office, he said, "You know I'm not gonna answer that question."

David said he's not worrying about it. "I'll be completely honest with you: When I get to the end of this life and I look back on my life, the first thing I'm gonna ask myself is, was I a good husband and was I a good father?" he said. "And if I can't say that at the end of this life, I will feel like I have failed. And if I get to the end of this life and I look back on it and I was or wasn't CEO of this company, that in my mind is not gonna be a determination for me on whether or not I succeeded or failed in life."