Forbes has named Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn to its list of the “World’s 100 Greatest Living Business Minds”.
The list is featured in a special edition published this month commemorating the magazine’s 100th anniversary.
In joining the prestigious ranking?whose members include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Carl Icahn and Donald Trump?Wynn attributed his success in large part to his companies’ focus on employee morale.
The chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts wrote: “Every day, (employees) hold 15-minute pre-shift meetings that start out like this: ‘Who can tell us about something that happened yesterday with a guest?’ Then when staffers tell the story, we reinforce it. We thank them. The supervisor calls a storytelling hot line. We then put the story on the in-house internet and plaster it on the walls. We make the storyteller a hero and do this hundreds of times a week.”
Adelson, chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands, highlighted the importance of reimagining existing business models.
“When I was 16, I bought a bunch of vending machines,” he wrote. “At the time, they were set up inside factories, which meant people only bought snacks during the 40-hour work week. So I moved the machines into gas stations, where cab drivers were lining up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Money came rolling in.
“Years later, I did a similar thing with casinos. Las Vegas had been successful in the United States, but China had a billion more people in it. Why not rebuild the Las Vegas Strip there?”
