Chronicle No. 48 · Lessons

Guest First, Company Second, Self Last: The Oberoi Dharma

India's most exacting hotel group wrote its ethics as a dharma, and built a school in an old Delhi hotel to teach it.

Most hospitality companies publish values. The Oberoi Group publishes a dharma — a word that carries duty rather than aspiration — and its central line is unambiguous about hierarchy: conduct which puts the customer first, the Company second and the self last.

The rest of the code is written the same way, each clause beginning with the word conduct:

• Conduct of the highest ethical standards, intellectual, financial and moral
• Conduct that builds teamwork on mutual trust
• Conduct that exemplifies care through anticipation of need, attention to detail, aesthetics, respect for privacy, warmth and concern
• Conduct that allows two-way communication and constructive dissent, while acting with conviction
• Conduct that avoids short-term fixes in favour of healthy long-term precedents

That last clause is the one most operators quietly break every week.

Words alone would not have carried it. In 1966 the founder, Rai Bahadur M.S. Oberoi, established the Oberoi School of Hotel Management, now the Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development, on the reasoning that his philosophy of hotel keeping depended entirely on managers groomed to share his obsession with the guest. The centre sits at Maidens Hotel in Delhi.

Its two-year post-graduate programme takes graduates in any subject, aged roughly 19 to 25, and combines classroom terms in Delhi with placements across Oberoi and Trident hotels. There is also STEP, an undergraduate route for school leavers paired with a degree from IGNOU, and an 18-month sales programme. The company pays for the faculty, the travel, the accommodation, the meals, the insurance and the uniforms.

A creed is cheap. A school is a commitment.

“Conduct which puts the customer first, the Company second and the self last.”

Lesson: A service creed earns its keep only when there is an institution whose job is to teach it, year after year.