Senior executives at the Ritz Carlton strive to balance efficiency and quality with the goal of maintaining the hotel’s reputation for creating an aura and experience of old- world elegance and legendary grandeur in locations ranging from the United States to Bahrain to China. If executives were to focus on quality, what precisely would this mean and how might they measure it?

Ritz Carlton’s strategy is to create an outstanding experience for its guests. One way to cre-ate this experience is to build hotels with stunning lobbies and spacious and elegant rooms and to hire and train a staff that provides excellent customer service. Project teams build each hotel with the usual “Ritz- Carlton” splendor, and maintenance teams ensure that the hotel preserves this décor and high level of service.

Questions

1. Consider the time it takes to register guests. Give an example of a cost in each costs of quality category— prevention costs, appraisal costs, internal failure costs, and external failure costs.

2. For each of the following perspectives, describe two measures that the Ritz- Carlton managers could use when evaluating quality, (a) customer perspective (b) internal business- process perspective and ( c) employee perspective? Explain why you think your choices of measures are important for Ritz- Carlton.

3. What actions can Ritz- Carlton’s managers, staff, and employees take to improve quality?

4. What do you think about the idea of organizing employees into “ self- directed” teams? Explain.

5. Would you advise the Ritz- Carlton to focus on quality? Why? Explain.