When I became the head of Marriott, in 1964, many people were surprised. I was only 32 and had worked at the company full-time for just eight years. My father, who’d started the business in 1927 with a root beer stand in Washington, DC, before moving into restaurants and then hotels, had an experienced executive vice president working for him who many thought would succeed him. He was 20 years older than I was, and when it came to finance, he was brilliant. But he was a micromanager. He spent a lot of time marking up contracts, redoing the work of the company’s lawyers. He didn’t have good people skills and didn’t understand the operation of the business. We had a senior director on our board who had been the chairman of three companies, and my father really relied on him. This director came to think that the executive VP was the wrong choice, and he urged my father to make me CEO. After all, I’d literally learned the business visiting restaurants with my father as a young boy, and I’d worked part-time in different jobs at the company since I was 14. My father was worried that I was too young, but Marriott was still small at the time—we had about $85 million in annual revenue—and I think he figured he’d be around long enough to bail me out if I got into trouble.