Bad Trade-offs

Yesterday someone posted on Twitter that she felt lucky to have her job, although it didn’t allow her to use any of her gifts. It made me sad to read that.

Here in Las Vegas, there’s buzz around rumors that the creative dynamo called Steve  Wynn may be moving his hotel empire to Macau. Since Wynn is credited with changing the face of this flashy city and his influence remains strong, his possible departure is cause for concern.

I’ve been fascinated by Wynn’s story for a long time, but it wasn’t until I read Winner Takes All by Christina Binkley that I discovered he also had fallen into a common trap—not unlike the one mentioned on Twitter.

Here’s what happened to Wynn. After masterminding the design and building of his Treasure Island, Mirage and Bellagio hotels, Wynn found himself managing thousands of people every day instead of spending time coming up with the Next Big Thing.

Innovation and management are certainly different activities and it’s hard to imagine that someone who loved to create gigantic surprises would be thriving in an office handling management problems all day.

I suspect it’s a role that crept up on him. I also know that millionaires don’t get much sympathy if they’re out of sync with their right livelihood, but that’s just another manifestation of the thinking that insists that money is valid exchange for personal compromise.

Remember The Peter Principle, the popular book from the seventies that suggested employees in a hierarchy tend to rise to their highest level of incompetence? It’s not just employees that need to be cautious. It appears that even the wildly successful can take a detour from doing the things they love.

Steve Wynn got back on track but it took a hostile takeover by the MGM who acquired his landmark hotels. After the bloodless coup,  Wynn went away for a brief period. When he returned, he announced, “Now I get to do what I really love–build things.”

He wasn’t kidding. Not so long ago, Steve Wynn told a reporter, “I just wanted to build places that made people go ‘Wow.’ I thought that would be a fun way to spend my life.” 

We know how easy it is as employees to find ourselves in an unsuitable position. What’s less obvious is that entrepreneurs can also end up in the wrong place. As Oprah once lamented, “You can get so busy running your business that you forget why you started your business in the first place.”

Even the smallest businesses, of course, require management. The tricky part is to balance it with the creative side of things.

So what do you want to manage? People? Huge sums of money? Manufacturing? Your creativity? Since you’re going to be managing something, it’s important to know what that is. 

The only definition of management that I’ve ever found appealing came from Charles Handy who said, “Managers of our own talents is what more and more of us are becoming.”  

Seems to me that good stewardship is the only way to prevent making bad trade-offs—or thinking that we’re lucky when actually we’re lost.