Most profound business lesson I have ever learned
Steve Wynn
In the spring of 2008, I received a call from a friend, a British hedge fund manager, who was attending the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles. "I've just heard the greatest business speech of my life," he told me. "bar none". The man he had heard was Steve Wynn, a billionaire hotel and casino owner. The way my friend described it, Wynn had walked unsteadily to a microphone onstage. His eyesight was failing and he needed to be guided to his spot. He had then begun talking quietly, so everyone in the audience had to lean forward to hear. "I'm going to discuss something publicly that I've never discussed in my career" he began. He called it the "most profound business lesson I have ever learned". Now he had everyone's attention.
Wynn has thrived in one of the toughest, most competitive businesses in the world: Las Vegas gambling and hospitality. He has been a key figure in the rapid growth of Las Vegas over three decades. Financed by junk bonds issued by Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s, Wynn was able to build the Mirage, his first great casino resort. Then came Treasure Island, the Bellagio, and ultimately his eponymous Wynn Las Vegas and Wynn Macau. When a man like that promises to reveal a business secret, you listen.
A few years ago, he had dropped his wife and adult daughter off in Paris and then flown on to Singapore. They were staying at a Four Seasons Hotel George V, just off the Champs-Élysées. One morning, they ordered breakfast in their room. Wynn's daughter Gillian ordered a croissant. It was delicious and rich, and she could eat only half of it. She wrapped the rest in plastic wrap and left it on the refrigerator so she could eat it when she returned from her day of meetings.
But when Gillian and her mother returned to their room, the croissant was gone. Ah well, they thought. Fair enough. Housekeeping must have assumed it was left to be thrown away. Then they noticed the message light was flashing on their phone. Wynn's wife, Elaine, called the reception desk. The Housekeeper wanted a word. "Thank you for calling," the housekeeper said. "We wanted to know when you got back so we could bring you a fresh croissant. The one you left out would have gone dry by now." So impressed was Elaine that she called her husband on the other side of the world. He in turn was so impressed that he called his friend Issy Sharp, the founder and chairman of the Four Seasons, in Canada. "He lit up over the phone," said Wynn." He said 'Oh boy, isn't that great?" As he told his story, Wynn himself, who has a broad, white smile, was grinning at the memory.
If he could have one professional wish come true, he said, it would be this: "that my employees would relate to people not as customer with an employee, but as two human beings talking to one another. Not Mr. Black jack dealer to Black jack player, but as Louise and Mr. Jones. If some some how we could harness that energy, we could change the history of the enterprise and achieve total market dominance in any service business in the world. Is it actually possible to scale up the attentiveness of that one housekeeper to an entire organization employing thousands? Could you, as he put it, create a situation where your employees, left alone with a customer, with no management supervision, could find a way to deliver service that made them feel instantly gratified?
Threatening punishment or offering financial incentives in a systematic way was difficult without an impossibly high level of monitoring. The only way would be to make an employee want to deliver this extraordinary level of service for reasons they found personally fulfilling. That, said Wynn, would be "the answer to a sailor's dream".
The dream turned out to be a system called "storytelling". At the Wynn Resorts, before each eight-hour shift, groups of twelve to eighteen employees meet up with their supervisor. Maids meet their inspector, dealers meet their pit bosses. These are the lowest ranks in the firm, the staff who deal with customers, and their immediate supervisors.
The supervisors begin the meetings with the question "Anything happen yesterday that is interesting?" Slowly, the hands go up. As Wynn describes it, one man mentions that he saw a woman drop something from her purse as she went into her room. He say it was her credit card, picked it up, knocked on her door, and returned it to her. Another man was helping a couple who had just arrived and realized they had left their medication at home in Encino, just outside Los Angeles, a five hour drive away. They were panicking and thought they were going to have to cancel their vacation and go home. No problem, the man said. Is there anyone at your house? A housekeeper the couple said. Fine, said the Wynn employee. His brother, Mr. Ramirez, lived not far away. He told the couple to instruct their Housekeeper that a man named Ramirez would be coming to pick up their medication, and that Wynn employee would then retrieve it from his brother. He told his supervisor about the situation, who told him to set off right away. The medication was with the couple before morning. And their loyalty to Wynn Resorts was likely guaranteed forever.
Each of these stories is published on Wynn intranet and printed up and posted on the walls of the service areas in the back of the House. Now says Wynn every member of staff wants their story on the wall. "Everyone goes to work looking for a goddam story the next day", said Wynn. "It is pristine, it is simple, it is profoundly effective, and it has changed the history of my enterprise."
For Wynn, storytelling as a means of getting employees to feel good about themselves through their work and provide superlative customer service as a result is "like splitting the atom".
This is from the excellent book,The Art of the Sale, Philip Broughton
I am always Blogging about automation destroying the human touch but if the it's done correctly the service can be a big hedge. Why? because
All things being equal, people will do business with a friend; all things being unequal, people will still do business with a friend.
Mark McCormack
