Pat Pacious is president and CEO of Rockville-based Choice Hotels International, which counts some 625,000 rooms in 7,400 hotels in 45 countries and territories. As one of 11 children growing up in Montgomery County, Pacious (who declined to provide his age) realized a Navy ROTC scholarship was key to paying for college, which is how he came to learn a hard lesson as a young officer in charge of a ship in the dead of night. Here’s what he learned when he “lost the bubble.”
One of the biggest things that happened to me that has been key to managing my career happened in the Navy. You get qualified in the Navy to stand on the bridge of the ship and maneuver it in a fleet exercise. This was probably my third or fourth time doing that, but I took the watch without being prepared. About 15 or 20 minutes in, I had, what they call in the Navy, “lost the bubble.” Ships were moving everywhere, and I had no idea what we were doing or what we were going to do next. And the embarrassing thing is when you have to call the commanding officer and say, “I need you up here on the bridge.”
You’re humiliated in front of everybody because you’re supposed to be the guy in charge. It’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you can’t see things other than lights or blips on a radar screen, so it’s not obvious what’s happening out there. Where’s your ship in the fleet? Where is it supposed to be in the next move? It’s a dangerous game: There are 450 people on that ship who are depending on me to make sure we don’t run into another ship or get in the wrong place. The consequences were major, and it was clear to me early on I better call the commanding officer and tell him I’m in over my head here.
That mistake really taught me. There’s an old adage, “prior proper planning prevents poor performance”—there’s a Navy version that’s a little more salty—but it’s really about being prepared for when you are going to take on something that you haven’t done before. In our business today, if we’re going to do something major, it’s all about that prior planning and thinking a couple of moves ahead.
At the end of the day, the commanding officer said, “You did the right thing. Calling me was the right thing instead of letting it cascade into a bigger problem.”
I’ve never forgotten that experience. I was probably 21 or 22 at the time. It’s a reminder to me that you learn from those mistakes and you say to yourself, Well, the next time I’m going to be better prepared. If there would be one mistake early in my career that really set me on a different trajectory, that would be it.
This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.