JAMES Smith is not a man who is usually short of things to say. Yet here he was, groping unsuccessfully for a word, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to find the requisite phrase; his open palm chopping back and forth as if he were trying withall of his faculties to ease the precise term from his mind.
'Traumatic? Well it is a little too heavy a word to describe things,' he said. 'Er ... how about sorrow?' came the suggestion. The Hong Kong Hilton's general manager had misheard.
'Sorry? Ah well, yes certainly I am very sorry this is happening. It would have been good if it could have carried on. When I go to the lobby since the renovation I feel very comfortable. You go to these new hotels and they are all nice and glitzy and everything but the Hilton ..., well it has got so much character. You just walk into the place and you think it is good. It is not just a physical thing, it's something that the staff exude too and it comes from them in so many different ways,' his non-stop loquacity once again restored to maximum.
The managers of internationally-known hotels are like the generals ancient Persian emperors despatched to run the satrapies of their far-flung empire. Both the managers and the generals are under the jurisdiction of a higher order, but in practice they are far enough removed from day-to-day control to make them absolute rulers of their domains.
Mr Smith's direction comes from Hilton International, but in the near-decade since he became general manager at the Hong Kong Hilton he has moulded the hotel into his own image, and in the process become the epitome of the highly-visible, autocratic, and larger-than-life hotel manager. Mr Smith, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Hotels Association, made the Hilton the official hotel for the Hong Kong Sevens, sent his chefs to cooking competitions around the world, introduced boxing smokers, the Hilton Playhouse and, of course, the annual week-long Scottish food promotion.
At the same time he revamped all facilities, climaxing with a $120 million refurbishment of the lobby. He smartened up the uniforms, introduced training programmes and managed to keep staff turnover down to the third lowest in the local industry, betteredonly by the Mandarin and the Kowloon Shangri-La, despite paying what he admitted are 'low to middle salaries'. Mr Smith also saw the hotel through the decade-long push upmarket, from a stop-over for tour parties to the infinitely more luxurious image.
History tells us that from time to time a Persian emperor would sweep through the satrapy of a general who was felt to have overreached himself and put him in his place. No one has accused Mr Smith of such overweening ambition, but nevertheless his power base appears to have been swiftly and surgically cut from under him.