Managing to Make a Difference

Chapter 31Bet on Talent

Continuously recruiting for your talent bench is the foundation for building extraordinary teams because extraordinary teams cannot exist without the right people. How are you defining the “right people” for your team? And what is the payoff for betting on talent? The stories and lessons of this chapter answer those questions.

Lesson

In building an extraordinary team your most important decisions involve who joins your team. In the words of legendary college basketball coach John Wooden, “Not every coach can win with talent, but no coach can win without it.”

Affirmative Action Quotas

In 1979, I moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to begin a new job as vice president of human resources for the Playboy Hotel and Casino, which was under construction. Those were heady days in Atlantic City. Too many casinos to count were also under construction. It was a genuine boomtown. There were cranes everywhere you looked. Tens of thousands of jobs were being created. It was very exciting to be a part of it.

The State of New Jersey authorized casino gaming not only to accomplish economic goals, but also to accomplish social goals. Understandably, the state wanted to ensure that casinos would work aggressively to achieve ethnic, racial, and gender diversity among their employee populations. It might seem hard to believe now, but we had to achieve certain quotas to be granted a license to operate our casino.

One day, the gaming commission called me to ask who ...