No poetry, no toxicity: Federico González, CEO of Radisson Hotel Group, on leading company turnarounds that work

Radisson Hotel Group CEO Federico González has turned around three major European hotel companies and sits on the board of Louvre. He has also spent years writing down every cultural anecdote and mistake he has made along the way, which is how he ended up a CEO with three published books on multicultural leadership. In this episode, recorded in person in Dubai, he tells Floor Bleeker that the most useful lesson of a career across cultures is to separate what is said from how it is said, because many leadership problems originate in communication rather than in substance.

He began writing down cultural differences in Sweden, where he ran marketing and sales for the Nordic region after growing up in a single-culture Spain and working in Brussels. In Sweden, lateness was read as a lack of respect, and a casual “guys, what you should do...” was heard as an order. An advertising campaign that had worked in France, Spain and Italy collapsed there because Swedish consumers distrust comparative claims; a brand that needs a competitor to look good is assumed to not be good enough to stand on its own. Those anecdotes became his first book. Portugal produced the second, because a country that looks nearly identical to Spain is where he made even more mistakes.

González is careful to draw a distinction that turns out to matter more for his day job: the difference between a genuine cultural gap and a company culture that just looks similar on the surface. Portugal nearly burned him worse than Sweden did precisely because it looked close enough to Spain that he stopped being careful. And three American companies, Procter&Gamble (P&G), Disney and Carlson, turned out to have almost nothing in common once he had worked inside all three. P&G wanted substance over polish, Disney, shaped by its Los Angeles origins, wanted everything to look good regardless of what was happening backstage. He puts it bluntly: there are more differences between someone in Minneapolis and someone in Florida than between a Frenchman and a Spaniard.

That distinction shaped how he approaches every turnaround. At NH Hotel Group, which owned or leased nearly all of its properties, he could simply dictate a new system. Radisson operates almost entirely through management and franchise agreements, so the same approach would have cost him business, because a franchisee can walk away to a competitor. The first task in any transformation is to understand what kind of authority the company actually has.

The title of the episode comes from two rules about how people work together. The first comes from Procter&Gamble’s one-page memo culture: every diagnosis, choice and plan must be understood in the same way by someone in finance, in IT or at the front desk, which is why colleagues warn each other that Federico dislikes "poetry". The second is an unwritten rule that Radisson is a company free of toxic behavior, which he says he enforces by dismissing anyone who breaks it, however good their results. Both sit alongside the company belief of “many minds, one mindset,” which allows disagreement but requires open and honest communication, something he found missing in a period when everyone in Brussels and Luxembourg was too nice to be transparent.

Moments that stayed with us from this episode:

• The one Swedish business rule that cost an entire ad campaign

• Why NH’s turnaround playbook would have failed completely at Radisson

• The “one-page memo” discipline and why he still can’t stand “poetry” in a strategy document

• His zero-tolerance rule for “assholes” in the company, and what it actually costs to enforce it

• His closing wish for how cities could plan tourism the way theme parks plan crowds

Media Contact

Kate Vinogradova

Content & Social Media Manager [email protected]