Tribal Gaming

According to the figures, Indian gaming took in $26.7 billion in 2008, which amounts to a 2.3% increase over the prior year and represents growth of more than $500 million over 2007. These figures imply that Indian gaming remains a strong means of economic development for Indian nations.

According to surveys, over the past decade, Indian gaming has more than doubled from $9.8 billion to last year’s $26.7 billion. The rate of growth of Indian gaming has, however, steadily decreased over the past few years.

Even though revenues are increasing, net profit at most tribal casinos hasn’t grown proportionally. Based on our experiences at Talent Blueprint, the most significant challenge is in specific areas systems thinking and competency development.

Systems thinking

A system is an organized collection of parts (or subsystems) that are highly integrated to accomplish an overall goal. The system has various inputs, which go through certain processes to produce certain outputs, which together, accomplish the overall desired goal for the system. So a system is usually made up of many smaller systems, or subsystems.

Every tribe we’ve encountered has had degree of opportunity in their various business systems, specifically, finance, marketing, slot department, human resources, training and food service. Once these systems are refined or enhanced, we’ve seen profit grow 10-40% in less than a year.

Competence Development

Progressive organizations take competence development seriously.

Our clients know that by defining or adopting competence models for their organization, they are providing the building blocks on which key Human Resource Management processes can be based. When implementing competence development, the use of automated processes will remove very large administrative loads.

When we work with our clients, we find that their employees and managers tend to follow into the “Understands” category, and this is simply a bi-product of them teaching themselves, often times no one has taken the time to show them how to function effectively in their position.

At Talent Blueprint, we help build employee and managerial competence by taking them to the next three levels: Understands how, Demonstrates how and Exhibits. The outcome of this change and developed competence development leads to increased profitability in each of the areas in which we specialize.

ROUGHLY HALF OF ALL MANAGERS don't trust their leaders. That's what Robert F. Furley discovered when he recently surveyed 450 executives of 30 companies from around the world. Results from a Golin-Harris survey of Americans back in 2002 were similarly bleak: 69% of respondents agreed with the statement." In that same year the University of Chicago surveyed 8oo Americans and discovered that more than four out of five had "only some" or "hardly any" confidence in people running major corporations.

Those organizations that chose to foster a culture of trust will be leading the pack when it comes to the war on talent. At Talent Blueprint, not only is trust one of our core values, it’s the way we do business. One of our goals in working with clients is to improve the trust in their culture.

"When trust is high people and systems function well.
When trust is low and fear is high these systems break down.”