Not all my children were in the running to succeed me. My daughter, Debbie, is the mother of five, and although she worked at Marriott as a teenager, she stayed home with her kids for three decades. Today she works as Marriott’s head of government relations, but she’s been in that role only a few years. My oldest son, Stephen, has a debilitating disease—he’s blind and mostly deaf. My youngest child, David, is just 39, and a phenomenal executive. He currently oversees all our hotels in the eastern United States, from Maine to New Orleans. He has tremendous potential, but at the moment, he is still learning.