If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a link to my latest from the LVBP:
But craps players and conventioneers both, even if they know of the efforts made by designers to craft a green building, are more likely to care about other things: How easy is it to get around this building? Does it make me want to enjoy myself?
This dovetails nicely with Chuck’s meditations on the artistry of Aria. The architecture doesn’t mean anything if the resort–and the people in it–can’t consistently get that kind of reaction from visitors.
In essence, I’m saying that they’ve built a lot of hotel rooms on the Strip, and now they have to find ways to keep them full. It’s not going to be easy. And just waiting for better times to return is clearly not going to move things forward.
The point I’m trying to make is that I’ve seen a lot of thinking along the Strip that’s reminiscent of students and gamblers. Here’s what you usually hear when grades come out:
“I got an A in the class.”
“The professor gave me a C.”
In other words, we’re responsible for our successes but not our failures. You don’t have to walk very far through a casino to hear this same mentality at work among gamblers. And these days, you can even hear it upstairs in executive offices.
Back in 2006, I didn’t see any annual reports saying, “Because of rising consumer credit and escalating personal wealth, we’re doing a bang-up business this year.” Instead, it was the bold leadership of the management team that was responsible for all the big rise in shareholder value.
Fast forward a few years, and we hear that “Due to a sagging economy, we’ve had lower than expected earnings.” Well, by now they’re usually expected to be pretty low, but you get the point.
I understand that no manager’s going to come out and say that they’ve done a lousy job of marketing and staffing their property, but it’s important to be more honest internally. Maybe it’s just semantics, but I think what people say reveals a lot about what they’re thinking. In this case, it’s very important for people to accept that the bad economy didn’t do anything to them: the choices they made, whether it was taking on too much debt or not maintaining service standards and the perception of value, put them into the predicament they are in today. They are fully capable of finding a way out of it.