Imagine that you grow up, literally, in the hotel industry. Your parents run an iconic pub and boutique hotel in Washington, D.C., where you spend your teenage summers cleaning rooms and working the checkout desk. After college, you intern at Hilton, go to business school, and then join the finance department of Marriott International, the largest hotel company in the world.
Over the next 25 years, you rise through the ranks to become one of Marriott’s most senior executives, and its highest-ranking woman, telling Fortune in 2015 that “anyone can make it to the top here if you work really hard.” And by 2021, when you’re named one of two executives sharing the duties of acting CEO and likely in line to become the next chief executive, it seems like your lifelong devotion to this industry is about to pay off.
