When the Mirage opened, it was amazing. But there were some things that weren’t – one was the Payroll/HR system that we designed and built. It failed almost immediately, and we had to shut it off and do manual payroll for 5500 employees for nearly a year; we quickly contracted with Deloitte to install an HR system then known as Infinium. Old legacy design that ran on an even older AS 400 platform – needless to say, I was bummed – I was still dreaming of the possibilities. I complained to anyone who’d listen and that eventually got to the President of Infinium who called to ask what I had in mind. Treasure Island had just opened, and we still couldn’t do the kinds of analyses and modeling that the system’s financial modules enjoyed so I started by describing what HR could do if it had those same capabilities. Turns out nobody had ever suggested creating a data warehouse of HR information and running the same business intelligence (BI) tools that Finance used against that. I didn’t know anything about the technical components behind my request, but I was able to clearly define the possibilities that it could create. Infinium’s developers were surprised and then excited to work on the challenges I laid out. It worked incredibly well and gave us the courage to define the possibilities around my paperless and self-service-ideas. I wasn’t the smartest person in any of those discussions, but the clarity and passion of my vision inspired people to consider it. I suspect there are lots of regular people working on all kinds of things that they think could be improved through creative innovations – all it takes is someone to listen to their ideas with an open mind. The moral of this story: focus on the possibilities and see what new products can be created today.
Anthony Jay “Tony” Robbins (born 1960): American author, coach and speaker.
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