Introduction – Becoming My Own Project
This series of articles was never part of a plan.
For most of my professional life, I have been asked to analyse businesses, hotels, projects, organisations, and occasionally the people leading them.
I would arrive in an unfamiliar place, ask questions, review reports, challenge assumptions, search for root causes, identify risks, and try to understand why things were performing as they were.
Over time, I developed a certain methodology:
- Observe
- Listen
- Dive deep into the business
- Challenge assumptions by asking hard questions
- Follow the evidence
- Look for patterns
- Distinguish symptoms from causes
And eventually ask a simple question: What is really happening here?
For the last 15 years, I applied this approach to others.
First as an independent adviser, then with a team of fellow specialists carefully assembled over many years, and eventually, in parallel, as a sector coordinator for a development bank.
My work brought me into contact with entrepreneurs, family businesses, investors, institutions, and banks across a wide variety of countries, cultures, and business environments.
Looking back, I believe I have helped many small and medium-sized businesses grow, adapt, or recover.
It is a heartwarming feeling to have done something meaningful.
The framework with the development bank was retired for all participating advisers, bringing my own involvement to a close after eight years of uninterrupted service.
Assignments ended. Roles changed. Professional priorities shifted.
After more than twenty-five years in hospitality and advisory work, I found myself entering a period of transition.
For the first time in a very long time, I had the opportunity to stop and reflect.
Frankly, the timing was probably good, if not overdue.
For years I had spent too much of my time away from home, moving between assignments, hotels, airport lounges, and meetings.
Suddenly, I had time for family, long walks with the dog, and, for once, plenty of time for myself.
Initially, the objective was practical. I wanted to improve my professional positioning.
Like many professionals approaching a new phase of their career, I was reviewing old projects and thinking about what I wanted to do next.
But the exercise gradually evolved into something else.
Instead of asking where I had worked, I started asking what I had learned.
Instead of reviewing achievements, I started reviewing experiences.
Instead of analysing businesses, I became the subject of my own analysis.
The process was not entirely comfortable.
For the first time, I became the subject of my own hard questions.
Looking backward rarely is. Some memories involved success.
Others involved mistakes, disappointments, failures, conflicts, poor judgement, misplaced trust, and lessons learned the hard way.
Titles changed. Projects came and went. Countries changed.
Yet something else happened.
As I reconnected with people from different periods of my life, some conversations resumed as if no time had passed at all.
Others never happened. Some doors remained open. Others had quietly closed. A few I chose to close myself.
The lessons remained.
The articles in this book are not intended as management theory written from an academic distance.
Nor are they intended as a memoir.
Rather, they are an honest reflection on experiences that shaped how I think, how I lead, and how I understand the world today.
They are also a reflection of what I have come to believe matters most.
Some lessons came from hospitality itself. Others came from remarkable people.
Some emerged from advisory work.
And some came from life outside hospitality altogether.
Together, they tell a story that took me many years to understand.
Not the story of a career. The story of the person behind it.
Looking back, I realise that hospitality taught me much more than how to run hotels.
It taught me curiosity, and…
- Perseverance
- Respect
- Calmness
- Leadership
- Responsibility
- Trust
… and eventually, humility.
Whether these lessons will resonate with others, I do not know.
But they have helped me understand myself.
Before deciding where I wanted to go next, I first needed to understand how I had arrived here.
And perhaps that is reason enough to write them down.
And by doing so, perhaps I will discover what else there is to learn.
About the Author
Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.
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