Schuetz: A Vital Human, A Vital Resource

“If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are an excellent leader.”

— Dolly Parton

She once suggested to a friend that I reminded her of someone who had smoked a great deal of dope when they were younger. I have never fully understood why she would say such a thing, but whenever I have mentioned it to someone else, they generally indicate that her statement made sense.

She came to Las Vegas from Kansas, and she came with an unbridled energy and not a lot of body fat. 

I met Cindy in the mid-1980s. At the time, she was an executive at the Sands (then a Summa, a.k.a. a Howard Hughes property), while I was running the casino and marketing at the Frontier, another Summa property. Cindy was pioneering a new area in Las Vegas called “human resources,” which suggested that there may be some benefit to treating employees like human beings. 

If you have never met Cindy, a.k.a. Cynthia, a.k.a. Cynthia Kiser, a.k.a. Cynthia Kiser Murphey, or “CKM” (a moniker given to her by the late MGM Resorts International Chairman and CEO Terry Lanni), you have missed something important. She is a person of enormous consequence. 

When we talk about Cindy, whose title at the Sands when I met her was VP of human resources, we are talking about one of the most significant people in gaming. When I say significant, she fundamentally changed the whole relationship between management and the workers and radically altered the relationship between the people working in casinos and the casinos’ customers. In other words, she introduced Las Vegas to human resources and hospitality management when Vegas was essentially the center of the U.S. gaming world — and it didn’t think it needed either human resources or hospitality management.

What Cindy did is particularly relevant because many innovations have been developed in Las Vegas, and regardless of what the Tourism Authority says, not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Instead, her ideas were exported across wide swaths of the gambling ecosystem. Cindy mattered for these reasons and more.

Employees matter

When it came to human resources, Cindy revolutionized the space by suggesting that the employees could be treated humanely, fairly, and with respect — a radical notion back in the day of STFU and dummy-up and deal.

Regarding hospitality, she had the novel idea that the most important aspect of guest service started with the employees, who were the primary contact points with the guests. Moreover, the employees could be trained to understand their critical role in enhancing the guest experience. Once again, radical stuff.

Now, for those who think these are nothing more than brilliant flashes of the obvious, you do not understand what Vegas was like back in the day. When I was at the Frontier in the mid-’80s, we saw the incredible work that Cindy was doing at one of our sister properties and decided to introduce employee and management training. For our managers, we had a program where one of the educational offerings was training on sexual harassment.

We had to stop this course because we were primarily educating our people that they had legitimate grounds to litigate against the Frontier. It seems that a lot of our managers did not need sexual harassment training, for they had been successfully sexually harassing people within the facility for many years, and we understood that we might be creating a significant liability for ourselves.

What adds great significance to Cindy’s efforts in Las Vegas is that she is a woman. In the gaming industry, men are generally the leaders, tend toward being pigs, and are not deep. For Cindy to accomplish what she accomplished was not unlike the story told by Gov. Ann Richards about the dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — and that is that Ginger had to do everything Fred did, but going backward and in high heels.

As an aside, this tendency will only get worse with the continued takeover of the U.S. by wealthy men who seem dedicated to pulling the welcome mat away from women in business.

Quite the CV

To write this story, I asked Cindy to send along her bio and resume. All told, it was four pages and did not contain any fluff. Check this out: 

Cindy successfully opened four megaresorts in multiple jurisdictions, including the world’s largest hotel & casino, as a senior management team member. She was one of the first female presidents on the Las Vegas Strip. She staffed and opened the Palms Casino Resort, bringing the historically financially troubled property profitability in Year One. She created more than 50 business partnerships with national brands to elevate the perception of New York-New York Hotel Casino and drive significant revenue gains during her presidency of that facility. She launched and led community relations efforts to reshape public perceptions in Michigan and Massachusetts, which aided in securing regulatory approval in both jurisdictions. She also founded one of the industry’s first diversity programs, which trained and certified more than 40,000 “Diversity Champions.” 

And this list goes on and on.

Then there is this, where she discusses her professional and community affiliations:

Hotel Employees and Restaurant International Union UNITE HERE Health and Welfare Fund, Trustee (for 25+ years). Nevada Medical Center Founding Board Member; UNLV Foundation Board of Trustees Member; American Heart Association, Past Chairperson; Health Services Coalition of Southern Nevada, Past Co-Chair; United Way of Southern Nevada, past Board Member.

And this is about 25% of the list.

Now, if any of you are curious, especially outside of the Las Vegas orbit, why you haven’t heard so much about Cindy, it is because, unlike so many men, she did not make it about herself. With Cindy, it was always about the mission and the people.

Curiously, Cindy is not in the American Gaming Association’s Hall of Fame. However, four men were admitted to this entity for every woman admitted in the last 10 years, an embarrassing improvement over prior decades.

This makes sense, given the blatant misogyny of the industry. This Hall of Fame underscores that this industry believes that “Honoring the Leaders and Legends of the Industry” apparently means that there are four men to honor for every woman honored. This industry is so mesmerized by the importance of balls over brains that it finds it easy to ignore or overlook the incredible contributions of women. Like I said, men are not deep.

As I approached the end of my last discussion with Cindy, I asked this fantastic person how old she was. She said she would not answer that question for just anyone else, but she would answer it for me.

She said: “Richard, we met in 1986 at a social function when I was vice president of human resources for the Sands. At that time, I was six years old.”

See, I told you she was amazing.

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Richard Schuetz entered the gaming industry working nights as a blackjack and dice dealer while attending college and has since served in many capacities within the industry, including operations, finance, and marketing. He has held senior executive positions up to and including CEO in jurisdictions across the United States, including the gaming markets of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno/Tahoe, Laughlin, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In addition, he has consulted and taught around the globe and served as a member of the California Gambling Control Commission and executive director of the Bermuda Casino Gaming Commission. He also publishes extensively on gaming, gaming regulation, diversity, and gaming history. Schuetz is the CEO American Bettors’ Voice, a non-profit organization dedicated to giving sports bettors a seat at the table.