The Postage Stamp As A Small Symbol Of Good Ethics

“Sometimes it’s the little things that count the most.”

— Alexandra Adornetto

I met John Miner in the early 1980s when I went to work for Golden Nugget Inc. At this time, Steve Wynn was chairman of the parent company, and John was the chief financial officer for the Las Vegas property.

I worked as a special assistant to the chief financial officer of the corporate entity, which was headquartered at the Las Vegas casino site. John and I met there and seemed to hit it off. We would visit occasionally and often have lunch together.

One day at lunch John said he had been offered the presidency of the Frontier Hotel and Casino, then a Summa Property (the Howard Hughes folks). I congratulated him, and he added that he would like me to move with him to the Frontier as one of his executives. I told him I was interested and would think about it.

Several months later, we were together at the Frontier.

On a Saturday, our routine at the Frontier was generally to arrive at the property around 9 a.m. It was normally very informal — Levi’s and casual shirt stuff.  It was an in-the-office day, understanding that all other office staff was off on a Saturday. There were few interruptions, and this allowed us to get a lot of that office stuff done.

After we both arrived at the property, we would get together for a coffee and a visit, sharing gossip, assessing the past week, and discussing who we had in the house by way of players for the weekend. This discussion was always in John’s office, for he had a great view of the pool and grounds.

One of John’s routines on Saturday mornings was to bring his personal bills from home along with his checkbook, and he would handle his bills as we were chatting. He always kept his personal postage stamps in his desk drawer, stamping the envelopes and tossing them into his outbox.

One Saturday, he ran out of his personal stash of stamps on his last envelope. He asked if I had any stamps in my office. I told him that I did. He asked me to get him one, understanding it was about a six-minute round-trip walk to my office. I did it.

John could have easily thrown that unstamped envelope into his outbox, and someone would have run that envelope through the company’s stamp machine on Monday and not thought a thing of it. I would guess the firm was mailing out thousands of pieces of mail daily. But this was his personal mail, where John drew a line.

This was an important lesson as I grew up as an executive. It was clearly an insignificant expense in the overall scheme of things, but it was the principle of the matter. This was one of the most important early lessons I learned about ethics in business and life, and it has remained important.

Ellsberg as example

One of my heroes from my college days and beyond was Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June. Mr. Ellsberg was a Harvard and Cambridge-trained economist who worked on a project with the U.S. government to analyze the confidential records surrounding the Vietnam War (these papers are now known as “The Pentagon Papers”).

In that process, he came to understand that the U.S. government both hid and lied about the events taking place in Vietnam, and this deception resulted in a prolonging of the war and many deaths. And the government was continuing to lie.

Mr. Ellsberg copied many of these documents and leaked them to the press in 1971. He understood that his actions could lead to a life in prison or worse, yet he did so because too many people were dying in the war and the American people were being deceived. He knew he had the receipts of this deceit and so worked with the press to ensure Americans had access to the truth.

He was arrested in 1973 and charged with crimes that could total over 100 years in prison. His case was dropped because of inappropriate governmental conduct. That misconduct included an effort by Richard Nixon’s “White House Plumbers” to collect dirt on Mr. Ellsberg by breaking into his psychologist’s office.

Again, what Mr. Ellsberg did was risk life in prison for getting a huge act of government deceit in front of the eyes of the world.

These two events, one involving a very inexpensive postage stamp and the other potentially changing the direction of domestic and global politics, have something in common: At their core, the people involved were behaving in accordance with a moral code. That is, they were behaving ethically. They were doing what they believed to be right.

One of the failings of our industry is that we seem to neither teach nor talk about ethics. We need to start having those discussions soon, I would argue, for it is a terribly important discussion if we desire to establish a sustainable gaming industry. It can start with honesty in our communications, be they communications with a market, a regulator, or the public.

Here is the first lesson, as the two stories above illustrate: Big or small, ethics is about doing the right thing. It might be a good idea to add that as a tick box for decision processes covering both our professional and personal lives.