GoKawiilLos Angeles boasts plenty of terrific hotels. At this writing, the top three on Tripadvisor are the Beverly Hills Hotel, Hotel Bel-Air, and the Peninsula Beverly Hills. If you can get a room at any of them for under $700 per night, Tripadvisor says you’re getting a “great value.”
The fourth name on the list is the Magic Castle Hotel. You can snag a room there for $199, but Tripadvisor doesn’t call that out as a great rate. The Magic Castle Hotel, as Chip Heath, the Thrive Foundation for Youth Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, describes it, “is actually a converted two-story apartment complex from the 1950s, painted canary yellow … [with] a pool that might qualify as Olympic size, if the Olympics were being held in your backyard.”
How does the Magic Castle Hotel maintain such an enviable Tripadvisor ranking among the 355 hostelries it lists in LA? In their new book, The Power of Moments, Heath and his brother, Dan Heath, a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE Center, trace it to the hotel’s ability to create “defining moments.” These moments, they say, are ones that bring meaning to our lives and provide fond memories.
One of those defining moments is the Popsicle Hotline. Visitors at the hotel’s pool can pick up a red phone on a poolside wall to hear, “Hello, Popsicle Hotline.” They request an ice-pop in their favorite flavor, and a few minutes later, an employee wearing white gloves delivers it on a silver platter, no charge. It’s a small defining moment that doesn’t cost much to produce, but has paid off for the Magic Castle Hotel.
In The Power of Moments, the Heath brothers identify four metatypical defining moments. Elevation moments transcend ordinary experience, like the arrival of an ice-pop on a silver platter. Insight moments rewire our understanding of the world, like George de Mestral pulling burrs from his clothes after a hike and getting the idea for a new kind of fastener that he named Velcro. Moments of pride accompany achievement, which is why employee recognition is such a powerful tool. And moments of connection — like weddings, graduations, and retirements — strengthen relationships.
Transitions, Peaks, and Pits
The problem with defining moments is that leaders and organizations often don’t recognize them and thus miss the opportunities they harbor. To solve that problem, Heath says, companies should start “thinking in moments” by looking for the transitions, peaks, and pits in their customer and employee experiences.
Quote You don’t have to excel at everything. You only have to excel at a few things that are going to be memorable. Author Name — Chip Heath
Transitions are the most undervalued and underexplored moments. “Most companies don’t have a great first-day experience planned for their new employees, even though that’s a really key transition,” Heath says. “When a customer calls her insurer because she’s had a kid and bought an SUV, there’s an opportunity to create a moment of connection. And what if a homeowner paid off his mortgage and a bank manager came to his home to present the deed and shake his hand, instead of charging an additional fee for the deed transfer? Nobody’s doing that.”
Peaks are obvious opportunities for creating defining moments, but often companies don’t take full advantage of them. “Retirement dinners are typically about elevation — there’s a special dinner — and connection, by bringing together people that the retiree has worked with over the years,” explains Heath. “But none of the ones I’ve been to include giving retirees a chance to hold the floor and talk about insights they’ve gained over the years. It seems so obvious. Why wouldn’t we add insight to that moment? And why wouldn’t we add pride to that moment by celebrating all the projects that we’ve worked on with this person and the progress that we’ve made?”
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