Adelson, Wynn among Forbes' "greatest living business minds"

“My business career has spanned more than seven decades and more than 50 different businesses, and I’m proud for that work to be honored, especially with such a distinguished group of individuals,” Adelson said, as quoted in a Las Vegas Sands press release. “As an entrepreneur, I never thought about doing what was popular. Instead, I’ve always approached situations – whether in business or philanthropy – to look at how I could be transformative by challenging and changing the status quo. That’s been my mantra all of these years, and I’m honored that Forbes believes that my entrepreneurial ways are worthy of distinction,” he added.

In the Forbes report, Adelson mentions the expansion of his company to Macau: “Las Vegas had been successful in the United States, but China had a billion more people in it. Why not rebuild the Las Vegas Strip there? Everyone else in the gambling industry thought it was the dumbest idea ever. I charged ahead in Macau anyways. Now all the naysayers would cut off their right arm to get a piece of land there. I’ve got a warehouse full of right arms, and a couple of left ones, too.”

On his turn, Steve Wynn wrote the following essay on his success:

"I'm in the service business, where 10% of the franchise is the stuff and 90% is the guest experience. So the big question for me: How do you motivate employees? With 13,000 of them at the Wynn and Encore, you can't have 6,500 supervisors watching 6,500 people. You need to have a culture instead of a payroll, so that people watch themselves. What does this? Not money, but enhanced self-esteem," the billonaire said.

"You need to have a culture instead of a payroll, so that people watch themselves. What does this? Not money, but enhanced self-esteem," Wynn affirmed.

"Spotlight programs, such as Employee of the Month, are great, but there's honest prejudice built into them, as well as luck. So we retrained 1,300 supervisors to become something of a psychologist and learn how to evoke a story. Every day they hold 15-minute preshift meetings that start out like this: Who can tell us about something that happened yesterday with a guest? Then when staffers tell the story, we reinforce it. We thank them. The supervisor calls a storytelling hotline. We then put the story on the in-house internet and plaster it on the walls. We make the storyteller a hero and do this hundreds of times a week. Now I have 13,000 people looking for a story--it's the thing that brings them all together. Since the employees get to nominate themselves, they control their own enhanced self-esteem. That's the key to paradise", he said.

Forbes list includes names like Giorgio Armani, Jeff Bezos, Bono, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump. Forbes magazine editor, Randall Lane, said that the magazine’s editorial team spent over two years creating the list. “These are the doers who have created, disrupted and innovated on a collectively historic scale. Honorees were required to actively participate in the project – all essays are original, wisdom is from the list- makers themselves,” he said.