Harvard Business Review, May/June 2024, Pages 66-74
Arnaud Chevallier, Frédéric Dalsace, and Jean-Louis Barsoux
While my generation of slot managers faced the daunting challenges of moving from reels to video, implementing player tracking, seeing TITO replace coin, surviving new venue competition and understanding the good/bad aspects of Free Play; what’s ahead could be even more disruptive and revolutionary.
Correctly cultivating Millennials and Gen Z’ers; co-existing with mobile gaming; dealing with a changing workforce; fending off cyber threats; and maximizing the benefits of AI are just a few of hurdles ahead that offer wonderful opportunities and/or pathways to ruin.
The winners tomorrow will be those who find the best answers. But in our chicken-or-egg world, those great solutions will most likely start with good questions.
That’s the subject of a valuable article that ran in the May-June 2024 edition of the Harvard Business Review.
It is not the first time that this magazine has discussed asking smarter questions. This current article quotes lines from similar discussions in 2018 and 2019. However, I found, and think you will too, that this story is one of their best. As the subhead states: “These five techniques can drive great strategic decision-making.”
One or two of the authors’ pronouncements are a bit generic: “The questions that get leaders and teams into trouble are often the ones they fail to ask.” But for the most part, this article drills down into practical ways to help you understand how to create great questions. One of the five techniques they label are questions that are “Speculative”. One line from that section is “to reframe the problem or explore more-creative solutions, leaders must ask things like ‘What if?’ and ‘What else..?’” Likewise, under the heading of “Interpretive” questions, they pose the often overlooked, yet critical point: “What are we trying to achieve?”
In each category of questions, they cite important business decisions made by leaders of major corporations based on these issues. These ranged from toy manufacturers to railway operators and online music services to pharmaceutical giants.
In my youth, I studied and practiced television and newspaper Journalism. While many do not hold that profession as highly regarded today, the educational path to that degree stressed the “5Ws” of who, what, where, when and why of any story or discussion. While those ingrained traits have irritated my wife for years, they also served me exceptionally well in the casino world, long after my journalism career ended.
So, the “why” of this review is: reading this article can help improve your skills in asking important questions that can make you, and your teams, more profitable and productive.
The “where” is here.
In case you are still struggling for topics to start your questioning, here are a couple of my personal suggestions:
- Who will be the first to remodel/rebuild their obsolete parking garages to be more like the one at Circa in Las Vegas?
- What happened to all that Plexiglas once the pandemic was over?
- When will operators discover that closing popular Bingo Halls wasn’t the best long-term strategy?
- Where will be the next jurisdiction to legalize casino or online gaming?
- Why do we continue to think opinion polls are even remotely accurate?
