When I first interviewed at the Golden Nugget, I was instructed to meet Charley Meyerson at a restaurant named… Charlie’s and we sat at a table that had a gold plaque embedded in it that said Charlie’s Table. I’d never worked in a casino before and that made a big impression; and from that moment on he became my mentor. In fact, he mentored most of the management at the Nugget (and then Mirage and Bellagio). He was a casino host, meaning he was responsible for his customers’ complete satisfaction, but to us he was the guy that taught us the business. He had a list of 44 rules – Charlie’s Rules, on the wall of his office and anyone visiting him there got a dose of them. Like No. 4: Learn to say “no” and still have the customer like you; or No. 15: You can’t make enough friends and you can’t afford one enemy; and No. 35: Don’t delay acting on a good idea; chances are someone else has just thought of it too. Success comes to the one who acts first. And No. 5: The customer should always be the hero. Years later, all of us still use these simple rules to guide our customer service ideas and training. He was the unlikeliest of mentors, but a generation of casino executives nonetheless paid close attention to his life lessons. That’s the mark of a good mentor. Find one and stay close to him or her today.
Junot Diaz (born 1968): Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fiction editor at Boston Review
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