How Accounting Impacts Corporate Strategy with Chip Jordan - Marriott is kind of known in the industry of being one of those companies that is savvy with regard to how transactions get done, a very big company with hotels all over the world. And so we have to create structures when we're doing planning that incorporate taxes, because taxes take a big bite of a corporation's profits. So what we have in our organization are a number of attorneys and accountants who are on committees and groups that go about helping the business develop new opportunities. And when those opportunities are being explored, we always weave in a tax portion. When the decision time comes at Marriott as to whether or not to go forward with a transaction, presentations are made to very, very senior management. And those presentations, in our case, always include a tax piece. So we want to make sure we're capturing the after-tax value of a transaction we're looking to do, or the expected value. And to do that, you've got to be very much involved with the tax planning from the beginning. When you think about a company's profit and loss statement, a major company like Marriott-- a Fortune 500 company, and we aren't alone in this situation-- one of the biggest expenses lines, and it is the biggest expense line on Marriott's income statement, is the income tax line. The corporate tax rate is 35% today. And that takes a bite out of the company's profits. And so, when you're looking at earnings per share, and indeed, tax cash flow, the tax line really, really matters a lot. And so what we've done at Marriott is set up situations, so that in my role as the head of tax, working with our friends in treasury and in accounting, we have a forum with the CFO, and then with the business side, the chief operating officer's side, that as we look at transactions, it is absolutely critical in order to get the best present value out of the transaction itself, you need to have as good a tax planning strategy as you can have, you can get, within the bands of the law. Well, tax as a career, I believe is a wonderful place to study, because it requires so much of the tax consultant. The tax consultant has to, at the same time understand very, very clearly the tax rules. And they're very complex, and no one has all the answers him or herself. And so we have teams that work very, very clearly to understand certain parts of the tax code that we apply to our business and apply to transactions that we do. That's very, very important. There's also accounting for income taxes, which are the GAAP rules, that are completely different, and run by different sets of rules, that are also very important. Those are the taxes that you will actually report on your financial statements. And then there's the business. You cannot get a good tax answer unless you're very, very good at understanding the business. And so we spend a lot of time in our group trying to figure out exactly what's in the business maker's head when he's doing a transaction, in which he's looking at something new we're going to get into, being a new country, being a new management arrangement, be it a new hotel brand. We're trying to figure out what's in that person's head. And then taxes have to do with quantitative numbers as well. Calculations are difficult at times. And we know that paying a dollar of tax later is better than paying a dollar of tax now. And so we quantify the goodness of the tax answers we're getting. And so that tax professional has to be at once a good business person, a good accountant, a good reader of rules. Most of those are lawyers, but there are some excellent tax accountants out there that are very, very good with the rules. And they have to have good business judgment in order to really, really be a partner in the business. And so I know my group is successful when we get phone calls and they invite us to come to the table. Someone says we're going to do something, and they say, Chip, bring somebody from your group, because we want to get their input.