Jeff Borman is Global Head of Sales, Revenue and Distribution for Virgin Hotels Collection, and he and Bart Berkey have known each other for more than twenty years, since the days when Jeff ran revenue for The Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City and Bart was there.

Which makes the first thing Jeff says about that period surprising. He thinks he did it badly.

His explanation is not modesty. He had come from the Marriott side of the business, he was technically right about everything, and he did not understand the room he was in. The general manager pulled him aside and told him that running a Ritz-Carlton like a Courtyard might be defensible on the numbers and was the wrong thing to say out loud, because the people in that building needed to believe nothing was like the Ritz-Carlton. Jeff left, and came back to the brand years later to do it properly.

That pattern runs through the whole conversation. He asked an AI to describe him and it told him he is someone who builds a thing, breaks it, and builds it again, which he had not noticed about himself. He traces it to two fathers, an artist and a corporate finance lawyer, one who taught him to see from a hundred thousand feet and one who taught him what a semicolon costs.

The part he says shaped him most is his mother. She never went to church. Asked why, she looked up at the trees and said, "This is my temple." It took him until well into adulthood to understand that she was not being idle, and that there is work happening in that stillness.

Bart matches him with a story from his own first day at The Ritz-Carlton, when a housekeeper greeted him by name and he was so determined to respond perfectly that he said nothing at all.

Then Bart asks the question the show is named for, and Jeff takes his time before answering it.

In this episode:

The mentor who blocked half of every Friday, and why ten percent of a week is enough

Why a quarter of your inbox never needed you

Why the trust had to come before the title

The job he thinks he did poorly, and what the general manager taught him

What an AI noticed about him that he had not

Two fathers, and being made of both of them

This is my temple

Forty things by forty, written down rather than thought about

What a be yourself culture looks like when it is real

The one thing he does that Most People Don't

ABOUT JEFF BORMAN

Global Head of Sales, Revenue and Distribution for Virgin Hotels Collection. More than twenty-five years in hospitality, with senior roles at Ashford, Hilton, Marriott and The Ritz-Carlton. Founder and host of the No Show podcast, with more than one hundred episodes.

Podcast: https://noshowpod.co

Most People Don't... But YOU Do! is hosted by Bart Berkey, who spent 16 years as a global executive with The Ritz-Carlton and now builds HUMANALITY™, a system for making people feel cared for, valued, seen and heard rather than processed.

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